But she never spoke to Ron Whitehead again. Not during the long drive home from the diner, or any day after. He wrote letters, but she didn’t read them. He showed up at her house, but she wouldn’t come downstairs. His mother came by with a homemade lemon cake and tried to say what a misunderstanding it had all been, how sorry Ron was, how miserable he was without her, all the weight he’d lost. She said the two of them would look back on this as a minor bump in the road if they could only get past it.
Nora barely heard her over the roar of her own blood. What a fool she’d been to make herself vulnerable in the first place, and to such a ridiculous man! How vain she’d been to believe the things he said, how weak! Her fury formed a barrier around her, and deep in the middle of it Nora felt an icy calm, a pain so deep it was almost gratifying. She sent a handwritten card to everyone they’d invited: We regret to inform you that the Stevens-Whitehead wedding will not take place as planned. She stuffed her mother’s wedding dress down into the garbage barrel in the backyard and stood back from it while it burned.
In December, everybody was glued again to the television, this time to watch the first draft lottery for Vietnam. It was all anybody talked about for a while, those dates. Any mother who had borne a son on April 24th had to promptly send him off to war; any mother who’d held off until April 25th could keep her boy at home.
Ron’s was the third birthdate drawn.
“See?” she told her father over dinner. “He’d have left me regardless.”
II. August, 1987
For ten years, she taught the fourth-and-fifth-grade combo class as there weren’t enough students to make a whole class of each. Governing a classroom suited her, and the children found her a strict but reassuring presence. But then her father got sick and she stayed home to nurse him. He needed care around the clock, and the days stretched into years, eight of them before he died frail and indignant in his bed. Now that the old farmhouse was hers alone, Nora opened the windows for a week to let the stale air out. She got rid of all the furniture and bought new. Big floral sofas. The kitchen wallpapered in a pattern of ducks.
Saturdays she went into town for groceries. If the weather was nice, she made a day of it, buying the local paper to read on the bench in front of the store. Framingham was a growing town but largely peaceful, so there wasn’t much to read about aside from the odd spectacular car accident, mostly caused by drunks. There were funnies in the back of the paper, and she read these too, wondering if anybody really found them funny, and if so, what they were smoking.
Mostly, she watched the other shoppers come and go. She looked for people she recognized, taking particular note of who was getting fat and who was getting old, though she supposed the latter wasn’t entirely their fault. Her sharpest attention was reserved for the young ladies, who’d taken to ratting their bangs and wearing boxy unflattering clothes and looked every bit as frightful as the hippies, only more self-consciously so. She looked for Anita Dewey among them, wondering if she’d recognize her crescent eyes, even under some tumbleweed of hair. She would be a young woman now, and Nora often wondered where she lived and what she did and what she remembered about her night in the wilderness. It aggrieved her that she’d been prevented from knowing the girl. Twice she’d tried to bring food to Mrs. Dewey — a meatloaf, a casserole — only to be stopped at the door. “We appreciate your interest, Ms. Stevens, but we’re trying to put that whole thing behind us.” And later, when the children were in Bible study and she saw them getting out of their car in front of the church, she’d rushed over to say hello, perhaps a bit more breathlessly than she’d meant to, and was met with “Ms. Stevens, please.”
Now the little boy would be a junior in high school. Nora knew from one of the teachers that he’d fallen behind a grade or two, and that he struggled with his schoolwork, his head drooping and eyes fluttering like a narcoleptic. Brain damage of some kind, apparently. People said he was lucky to be alive, and Nora agreed, though she thought luck was a strange thing to ascribe to a person kidnapped, stripped naked, and hung — all before the age of four.
She folded the newspaper on the bench beside her. All around, the parking lot had begun to fill with cars — doors slamming, engines starting, shopping carts rattling over asphalt — and she had to admit that some small, stupid part of her lingered in the vain hope of seeing Ron. She’d heard from Marjorie (married now, and a mother of three) that Ron had made it home from Vietnam in one piece and had moved to a suburb of Phoenix, more than four hundred miles away. Still, he came back every summer to visit his sisters, accompanied by his Asian wife, whose named sounded to Nora like someone spitting — Pa-tooey or Hi-yuck. They had several children themselves — oriental-looking, like their mother — so Nora figured if they ever stopped in for groceries they’d be hard to miss.
But today the parking lot was full of tourists from Texas and California, lumpen people in khaki pants. They came to see the mountains, and to ride a coughing old train, and sometimes you could see them wading around in the river downstream from the old uranium mine, where the water was radioactive. That very morning she’d seen someone fishing, and she was thinking about this when a gust of wind lifted a page from her newspaper and tumbled it down the sidewalk.
A passerby caught it with a quick stride. He was a young man with broad shoulders and baggy Hawaiian shorts. He had two children with him, girls preoccupied with lollipops.
“Oh, thank you,” Nora said. “This wind! Can you believe it?”
The man didn’t answer. He went on, one hand on each of the girl’s heads, steering them toward the store. There was a briskness in his movements, a kind of mustered pluck, and Nora felt the same compassion she always felt when she saw a man tasked with childcare. “Samantha,” she heard him say as they approached the automatic doors. “No running off. You hear me? I want you right here by me the whole time, both of you.” He straightened his shoulders and Nora saw that he was older than he’d looked at first, probably in his mid-thirties, with a potbelly pushing against his T-shirt. His blond hair was cut short as a soldier’s, and he had a tattoo on one of his calves, a large compass in black ink.
It was only after the automatic doors swooshed shut, and the three of them disappeared inside, that Nora realized who it was. LeDivic. The name rose in her throat like bile.
How could he be walking around, completely free? A regular man, with errands to run? With children?
She gathered her purse and stood, breathing hard, watching the doors through which he’d passed. She didn’t know what to do but had a sudden, strong conviction that she should keep an eye on him, at least, so she took a cart with a wobbly front wheel and followed him inside.
The store smelled like fried chicken, and Nora was aware of the drippy saxophone music being piped in from overhead. Her cart thumped and squealed past the pharmacy and the movie-rental kiosk. At last she found him in the dairy aisle, chewing a thumbnail, contemplating the cheese. One of the girls sat in his shopping cart, posing what sounded like questions, while the older one had wandered a few yards away, stepping heel-to-toe, following the pattern of the floor tiles. She wore a bright yellow sundress, and her hair had not been combed.
Nora turned to examine some premium charcoal briquettes. Why they were sold in the dairy aisle she couldn’t imagine, but she lifted the bag into her cart and pushed it closer to LeDivic.
“You like watermelon flavor,” he was telling the child in the cart. “You liked it last week.”