She lifts her hands once more, curls her fingers over the keys.
The front door latch clacks. He’s home.
She has left her office door open for this. An invitation to him.
The rustle of him now in the foyer.
She puts her hands on the desktop.
She waits.
She hears nothing.
She turns in her chair.
He has not silently appeared. Perhaps he assumed the open door of her office meant that she was elsewhere.
Or perhaps he needs to be alone. This is an interpretation she expects to wish to be true. She shouldn’t want to hear about his hospitalized father, a man she has always found insufferable. But, in fact, she wishes Robert had understood the open door and rushed to it.
He has done no such thing.
And her mind, following along in its own path, yields this: William Quinlan is the product of a victorious army, its monuments boilerplated with conventional self-congratulation.
She turns back to her computer. But she looks beyond its monitor, through the window, out to the live oak. This tree was already massive when her ladies were composing their words. She invites them. She arranges them beneath her oak, their skirts spread out around them, basket lunches at hand.
Unexpectedly, they turn their faces to her.
And she rises to look for her husband. She steps from her office. She moves along the hallway, past the foyer, and she stops at the bottom of the staircase. She listens upward.
But the sound that catches her attention is the ricochet chirp of a cardinal. Distant, but not a sound to be heard from where she is standing.
She steps into the living room.
At the far end a French door is open. Robert is framed there, his back to her. He stands very still, looking out to the oak.
She remains still as well. She watches him for what feels like a long time.
Then his head dips abruptly down. Something has finished in him. He turns and starts at her presence.
“Sorry,” she says, moving toward him.
He steps in. “I didn’t know where you were,” he says.
They approach each other but stop short, not touching for a moment as she tries to read him and he tries to collect himself. She looks him carefully in the eyes, his green eyes, which she resolved to do night before last in the bed, in the dark, drawn into a long-set-aside memory. How deep their color seemed to her when they first met, but they are paler to her now, green but not Monet green at all. Were they ever? Have they diminished over the years, gradually, she simply never noticing? Were they never what she thought? Or is this grief she sees in them?
She steps into her husband, putting her arms around him, turning her face and laying her head against his shoulder, telling the ladies beneath the oak to hush.
He pulls her gently close.
The two of them say nothing till they pull apart just as gently.
She looks again into his eyes. They are saturated but unblinking, refusing to express a tear.
“What’s happened?” she asks, instead of asking more directly, Has he died?
Robert’s eyes stay fixed on hers but his head twitches ever so slightly to the right. She takes this as: Happened? He broke his hip is what happened. What he’s really thought does not, of course, occur to Darla: Happened? How do you know? Has he said these things about me to you?
She tries to clarify. “I thought perhaps he took a turn for the worse.”
“He’s bad enough.”
“I understand,” she says, feeling clumsy, caught in the implication that Robert’s sadness could be caused only by his father having died. She assumed that mere suffering would simply bring out the abrasive worst in William Quinlan, a worst that would primarily irritate Robert. “He must be in a lot of pain,” she says.
Robert simply shrugs.
Something has happened, she decides. Just not death. Now she assumes it’s something William has said. But other than expressions of quotidian grumpiness or reflex jingoism — none of which, surely, would affect Robert like this — she cannot imagine what.
Robert turns away, wishing to sit down. Only once, many years ago, did he voice his delusion to Darla. He submitted to her his father’s pride in his Vietnam service to help explain how he ended up a soldier in the war that this beautiful and righteously impassioned woman despised. And he submitted it along with a manifestly mature clearheadedness about his need for his father’s approval, which allowed the delusion to be unquestioningly shared by them both.
His first impulse is to sit in his reading chair. It’s angled away from everything in the room except the French doors. It faces the oak, which is on his mind. He has never said a word to Darla about killing the man in the dark. He has never said a word to anyone. He is weary and he wants his chair for the privacy of his present thoughts. But he does not want to snub his wife. So he moves to the sofa, which also faces the veranda, and he sits there at one end.
Darla has watched him make this choice. She senses he’s made it to acknowledge her presence. But he does so without looking her way, without saying a word, and he has placed his back to her. So she circles the sofa but stops at the far end. “Would you prefer some privacy?” she asks.
He looks at her. “No,” he says. “Sorry. I just needed to rest.”
She sits too. Not next to him but not quite apart.
They say nothing.
Darla will not press him for words.
Robert’s mind is full of them: It would be better if I’d fully earned his scorn in the way he pictured me. If I’d stayed behind the walls of MACV that night and never killed. Or simply killed from there in an indeterminate way, as I may have done sometime during the next few days, spraying rifle fire with others into trees and building facades and down the street, aiming at muzzle flash. It would even be better if I’d not gotten lucky that first night: not found my way to the gates of MACV; not arrived in the middle of a battle lull with the right cries and somebody to hear them so I could make a dash to the gate; not dodged, at the last moments, some surprised enemy fire. Better if I’d simply died that first night trying to get back. Would my father, to his surprise, have perceived some sort of courage in a dead body in the street with a pistol in its hand? Would he? Of course he wouldn’t. Of course not. He would have known my actions for what they were: headlong flight into cover, more proof of my instinctive cowardice. But at least I never would have heard about it. Fuck you, Pops. Fuck you.
And in the lull from a heartfelt fuck-you, Robert becomes aware of his wife next to him. He turns his face to her.
Gazing beyond the veranda as a pair of mated cardinals spanks across the yard, Darla senses Robert at once and looks at him.
And the lull in him ceases. He looks away from her, but she has replaced his father in his head. It wasn’t until we’d had sex, until we were quiet at last and slick with sweat, that I explained my work in Vietnam, my work so like research, my work so unlike that of a man who was ready to kill for his country. But when she’d finally asked how it was for me there, my carefully arranged job was all I spoke of. All she wished to know. She was relieved. I was no killer but I was no coward. I was perfect for her. She was glad I was alive. What would she have thought if I’d gone on to tell her about my man in the dark? If I’d told her how I killed a man when he might have been anyone? How he frightened me, so I shot the man down. Decades later she would bitterly criticize two high-profile Florida cases of men acquitted of murder for standing their ground. Back then, at the beginning for us, in her antiwar passion, would she have gotten up at once and gone to the bathroom and closed the door and washed me off her body forever? Or because she was already falling in love with me would she have been glad I hadn’t taken the risk?