As Carey drove along River Road to the south he said, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” said Jane. She looked out across the half mile of moving river at Grand Island. When she and Jake’s girls were children there were still lots of places over there where they could walk across a swampy field and fight their way through impenetrable thickets to streams full of perch and sunfish. The lights of the Holiday Inn across the water were in the spot where there used to be pilings from the old ferryboat landing and a vast empty field of dry weeds like hay. Sometimes they would search the pebbly shore with sticks and find big, heavy pieces of rust-encrusted iron that did not suggest any known use but had probably come from old-time lumber boats.
Carey drove east out of Buffalo on Main Street into the open suburbs, until they came to a sprawling restaurant built around a coach stop from the early 1800s, along the road that was laid over the Seneca trail. There were big stone fireplaces where resin-soaked pine logs flared and crackled, fed a steady stream of fresh oxygen by the air-conditioning. The walls were lined with buggy whips and harnesses and Currier & Ives prints, and when the food came, the roast beef was served with Yorkshire pudding.
They sat at a table beside the front window. Jane smiled as she surveyed the dining room. “I forgot this place existed.”
“Me too,” he said. “I picked it because it’s a good place to talk.”
“You picked it because it reminds you of your house.” Jane had seen an old Holland Land Company map that Ellicott, the company agent, had used for the sale of Seneca land in 1801. Clearly marked in its place was “McKinnon house.” “What do you want to talk about—horses?”
Carey was quiet and serious. “Last time, you told me about your trip. Are you going to tell me this time?”
“I think I did what I wanted to do.” Her eyes scanned the empty tables around her to be sure none of the waiters had drifted too near. “But it wasn’t smooth.”
“You mean somebody’s looking for you?”
“Maybe, but not hard, and not for long. It had nothing to do with me.” She scanned the restaurant again, and when her eyes returned to him, she smiled. “Sounds brave, doesn’t it?”
“I’m awed, as usual,” he said.
“Don’t be. Twenty-four hours ago I was as scared as anybody alive. I could almost taste the strawberries.”
He cocked his head. “What strawberries?”
She looked down and shook her head. “It’s just an old expression.” She paused. “Really old. It means you came so close that you could already taste the wild strawberries that grow by the path to the other world.”
He looked down too, and then up again to fix his eyes on hers. “Want to tell me what brought that on?”
“I made a mistake—took a chance to buy some extra time for my rabbit. I ended up in a high place, looking down, the way you do in a bad dream.” She patted his hand. “Since I didn’t fall, I guess you could say nothing actually happened. What did you do while I was gone?”
“Surgery every morning at seven except Friday. Office visits from one to five. Hospital rounds five to seven.”
“And then?”
“I thought about how to talk to you. You’re not that easy. You have a long history of standing up and walking around whenever anybody says anything, so I decided to take you to a restaurant.”
“Big talk, huh? Serious stuff?”
“Yes. You told me what happened on your trip in December. You said that I should think about what I’d heard. If I asked you again after I’d thought about it, you would say yes.”
Jane said, “No, I told you I loved you. I told you that if you asked me again after one year, I would say yes. And if you do, I will.”
Carey’s long, strong fingers moved up his forehead and pushed back the shock of hair that had begun to creep down. “I’m a very quick thinker. I’ve been thinking about it for six months. No. Let me start again,” he said. “You and I have known each other for almost fourteen years. We were sophomores that night at Uris Library when Sally introduced us.”
“Right,” she said. “You were doing sickening drawings of invertebrates. Compound eyes and mandibles.”
“So whatever fundamental judgments we needed to make about each other have been made. That was what this was about, wasn’t it? You told me something that I hadn’t known about you. You wanted to be sure I didn’t assume I could ignore it and then start mulling it over after it was too late.”
“That’s part of it,” she said. “We have to be friends, because we are. We don’t have to get married. That brings on a whole new set of rules and agreements that are very rigid and binding, and nobody should do it who has any doubts.”
“Are we still talking about the same thing?”
“I’m not talking about one thing,” she said. “I’m talking about everything at once, because that’s what marriage is. You take all of the complexity of your life—Who is this person? Do I approve? Where do I want to live? Who are my relatives? What time do I get up? What do I wear? What work do I do?—and compress all of it into just one question: Do I get married or not? That was why I picked a year.”
“You made your decision in a day.”
“I’m very introspective, and I spend a lot of time alone.”
He shook his head and chuckled sadly. “I want it on the record that I haven’t seen any other women since we talked about this.”
“Come on, Carey,” she said. “You’re so dour and businesslike. It’s not like you. This is about being alive and happy. We’re old buddies. We know way too much about each other to start making speeches. I’m glad to hear you’re not molesting the nurses … anymore. But that’s just my possessiveness. I’m not checking compliance with an agreement.”
“You started it. In December.”
“I had no choice,” she said. “That was disclosure.”
“It seems to be what’s standing in the way now.”
She sighed. “You are a person who spends his life taking patients who are probably going to die and fixing them up. It’s an obsession. It’s what you have instead of a religion. I told you because not telling you would have made everything else a lie. I had just come home from a trip where I had killed some people. I am, technically and legally, a murderer. That’s not a small thing. It puts you in danger too—again, technically and legally. But also philosophically. Emotionally. I did something that is against everything you believe and everything you know.”
“How do you feel about it now?” He lowered his voice. “Are you sorry? Afraid? Proud?”
Her eyes turned on him in a glare, then turned away again. “It’s something to be avoided.”
“Do better than that.”
“It was the most horrible experience of my life. If the same circumstances came up tomorrow—no, right now, tonight—I know I would do it again. It would be much harder because I would know what it was going to look like. It also taught me some other things I had avoided knowing.”
“Like what?”
“All these years I was telling myself that what I was doing was unambiguous. I was taking people who were in the worst kind of trouble and making them disappear. That made sense. Whoever was in danger of dying didn’t, so nobody did. But I should have admitted to myself that one day I wasn’t going to run fast enough, or I would take a wrong turn. Until it happened I didn’t realize that what I was doing wasn’t just saving people. I was choosing a side. There aren’t any good guys in a fight to the death. So now I know, and you know.”