After a long silence, a hinge squeaked just once — the one on the front door. I heard a step on the porch, then nothing, and finally the sound of the car. Then lights. When I jumped up and looked out, she was driving down to the highway, toward town. Where she was headed, I had no idea and didn’t care, even slightly. All I could think of was that now, at least for a while, I was rid of her. I went back to bed and resumed where I’d left off, about this question I had to have answered, this riddle that was now my life: who was I?
10
I may have slept a little, but not much. I kept working on it, putting this, that, and the other together, that I remembered from when I was little and from what I’d been told occasionally. Then it was morning, and I knew I had to talk, to tell it, to let it out, to the one person I wanted to know it, the one person who mattered to me — Jill. I jumped up, went in the living room, and looked Marietta Memorial up in the book. I called and they gave me her room number; then she was on the phone.
“Jill, if you love me, get out here and get out now. Something’s happened, and I need you. Take a cab.”
“What’s your mother going to say?”
“She’s not here.”
“Oh my! I can’t bear it!”
“Jill, hurry it up!”
“OK, soon as I grab me a bite of breakfast and find out who’s paying my bill.”
“Forget about breakfast. I’ll make you some when you get here!”
I guess the next hour, while I stomped around out front, was the longest I’d ever spent in my life. Actually, I couldn’t make with the stomping until I’d put in my call to the place where I worked in town, the filling station I mean, to say I couldn’t come in, that I had to stay at home in case the deputies came for more questions. I hated doing it. I was in line for manager later on in the summer. My qualification for the job — my main qualification anyway — was that I was steady. I showed up for work every day. I was sober. I got things done. And the customers believed what I said. But as soon as I started explaining the fix I was in, Joe cut in. “Forget it, Dave. My God, it’s an honor. The whole town’s talking about you. You’re in every paper there is, you’re the county’s number one hero. Take all the time you want.”
I went out to think that over and walk around waiting for Jill. At last there was the rental car and then she was getting out, a bundle of newspapers under her arm as thick as a hickory tree. I kissed her and grabbed her to carry her in, but she held off and said she could walk — which she did with a limp but steady enough. She was still in the nurse clothes from the day before, but was due for a whole new outfit, later that day, she said, “from a shop in Marietta that Bob York found in the phone book. And a room in a hotel, a sure-enough hotel, to stay in as long as I’m here. And a thousand dollars cash to ‘tide me over.’ I’m Jill — fly me. Being a star pays.”
By then we were inside, and I folded her in. We stood there a long time holding each other close. Then we opened the papers on the floor. There were a couple from Columbus, one from Akron, one from Pittsburgh, two or three from Chicago, but none from Marietta. The Times is an evening paper and wasn’t due out until later. Sure enough, side by side on page 1 of all the papers, there was Jill and there was me — me in my sheepskin jacket, she in her hospital bed. There were also pictures of Shaw, a small inset blown up from a snapshot, and one of Russell Morgan with a pipe, looking important. How that happened, how all the papers had pictures when only three had sent reporters, had been explained by the Times reporter. They were wired to the papers. “It’s a regular gold mine for us,” the reporter said. “Boy, we’ll clean up on this — on top of the special we’ll send, signed by me under my personal byline.”
After a while we remembered breakfast. I made eggs and fritters. Then at last she asked: “What was it, Dave, that you wanted to tell me?”
“I’ll get to it.”
“Well? I’m listening.”
But for some reason, to tell it that way was tough. I couldn’t seem to do it. A little later, though, when we were back on the living room sofa, her head on my shoulder, her hair brushing my nose, I began edging toward it. “Something’s come up,” I said. “Something Mom told me last night. Or this morning, whenever it was. Before she blew with the car.”
“Told you? About what?”
“Who I am.”
That was when I knew that what was between us two was a whole lot more than how pretty she was or how we loved each other. She twisted to look at me, then squinched her eyes up, and whispered: “OK, Dave, I’m with it. What is this?”
“She’s not my mother.”
“I wondered about that.”
“How did you catch on?”
“She didn’t act like a mother.”
“You can say that again.”
“What’s the rest?”
I told it little by little, going back to Aunt Myra — how beautiful she was, how wonderful she’d been to me, the things that had happened with her, like the time my cart got busted, when one of the wheels came off, and she took it to a garage to get it fixed. But I kept shying away from my father, until she cut in to say: “Dave, you can trust me. Say what’s on your mind, what you’re leaving out.”
“You mean, about him?”
“Who is ‘him’? Did she say?”
“She swore she doesn’t know.”
“You believe her?”
“I think if she’d known, she’d have said so. From what she said, he’s not from the Big Sandy country. Could be she never heard his name.”
“He must be somebody, though.”
We talked then, me with that wonderful feeling that I could talk it out with her. Sometimes we’d think of some angle together, like the deal that must have been made for my board and keep and expenses and how my father must have it, have plenty to lay on the line, to make such an arrangement as that, and how much he must love Aunt Myra.
Then she said: “Dave, something’s on my mind, my locket. I hadn’t expected to mention it, on account of her, her being here, I mean. It would have meant I’d have to come in, and I couldn’t have. But now that she’s not here—?”
“Your locket, you said?”
“I had it on a chain around my neck when Shaw pulled me out of that plane. It could be out there on the island! If we went out and looked now—?”
“Right away now, quick.”
We went down the path to the river, to row out in the johnboat. But when we got to where the boat had been pulled out on the bank, it wasn’t there any more. It was half-capsized on a tree, a snag from upriver, between island and bank, that had washed down some years before in the flood that made the island and which moved a few feet each year as a rise would lift it along. There had been a rise in the night, perhaps from Saturday’s rain, that had not only moved the tree but also the boat. “That’s nice,” I said. “You lend someone your boat and they don’t even tie it up right.”
“How do you get it back?”
“You’ll see.”
“Dave, don’t try to wade in or swim to that boat. You can’t. You’ve no idea how cold that water is.”