A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [41]
“I do.”
“They’re right in season now.”
“Yes, this is the best time.”
“I can’t wait to try them.” He glanced at his watch again.
She thought he was concerned about walking home in the dark. She had already said she’d give him a ride.
“That was something I really missed,” he was saying. “Fresh strawberries. So many other things I forgot about . . . well, not really forgot. Just never gave much thought to. It all just kind of faded. The possibility—I guess that’s what I mean.” He shrugged uneasily.
It was the most he’d ever shared of his feelings. Tensed on the edge of her chair, she stared at his face, the strong chin, the smooth cheeks and wide brow, boyish in spite of all he’d been through: depravities she could only imagine, loneliness more terrifying to her than death. Twenty-five years, she thought, heavy eyed with this blinding ache in her belly, twenty-five years and he’s never been held or touched by a woman. There was an odd agelessness about him. He was both young and old, but with no experience, no connection in between. Her head trembled with the struggle to keep her fists clenched on the table. Let me help, let me touch you and hold you, give me your pain and I will show you how good life can be, how beautiful. There wasn’t a morning she didn’t wake up knowing that this was the day she had been waiting for. Love, with its mysteries and excesses, children, food, laughter, it was all such a wonder. Even grief had its own allure. At wakes and funerals she could give the best and most of herself, consoling, weeping, embracing even mere acquaintances in their time of need. She had never been afraid to feel any of it. Being unable to love, that would be the worst torment of all.
“Some things never go away, do they?” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She had to be careful. She had drunk almost the entire bottle of wine herself. This time she had vowed there wouldn’t be even the suggestion of intimacy, no touching or sitting too close. First there had to be an emotional connection. “It must have been so hard. I mean, I can’t imagine it, being so young and then suddenly it’s all gone, everything you’ve ever known or wanted. Your future, I mean, what does that do to a kid?” His implacable stare seemed too high a wall to surmount. She waved her hand weakly. “How do you live without . . .” What was the word he’d used? “Without possibility? How do you do that?” she asked, voice and heart quavering with the message in his cold, unblinking eyes that she had gone too far again, not with the bulk of her flesh this time, but with her own pain—when it was his pain she was feeling, his wounds she would help heal.
“That’s just the way it was, that’s all.” He looked at his watch.
“But you had to be so strong. I mean, when you knew—”
“I had to be realistic.”
“But Jerry Cox lied. You know he did. He went back there after. He went back by himself.” She felt herself stumbling toward him now but couldn’t stop because she had read all his testimony on microfiche and needed to help, needed him to know that if no one else on the face of the earth believed him, she did. He may have left the woman unconscious under the pillow, but he had left her alive, not strangled to death the way they said.
“I’m not going to talk about that.” His face blurred over the long blue flame. “If you don’t mind,” he added quietly.
“I’m sorry.” She stood up. “I’ll get your dessert. It’ll only take a minute.” She patted his shoulder and he looked at her with an expression of such anguish, such loss, that from now on, whatever this poor man wanted, she would do it. Anything. Anything at all, her eyes told him.
“I have to leave in a half hour. I’m being picked up.”
“What do you mean?” She turned dizzily. “Who? Who’s picking you up?”
“A real estate agent. Jilly Cross. That was the appointment. Remember? When I called—so I changed it. I changed the time.” Clearly nervous, he checked his watch again. “You don’t have to slice them, you know. I mean, they’re just as good whole.” He swallowed hard. “And maybe