A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [204]
The pond had meant various things to all of the people who had lived on our farm—and it would be the Boy Scouts’ best place—but for us it would always be more than just what it was, a shallow hole filled with water, a few cold, nearly dead fish on the bottom. The water was motionless. It looked, through the trees, as if it was a large eye that would have been grateful for a lid, for sleep.
The terrible thing, I wanted to tell Howard, the terrible thing is that there is so much good, and gradually it slips away from you. I had not believed until last summer that loss is determined, charted in us from the start, as inevitable and fixed as blood type and eye color. As I stood against the tree I remembered only days before, after the verdict was read, after I was acquitted. The jury had deliberated for two hours, while we waited in the courtroom. The words, “What say you?” and “We find the defendant not guilty” rang in my ears and the room began to reel around me. I didn’t cry. I must have stood up because I found myself in Rafferty’s plaid embrace. He had not spoken more than five words to me since my testimony. Howard was putting his arms around the two of us. The judge in his imposing desk, the jury members, the spectators, were slipping back and forth. I looked out over Rafferty’s shoulder and I saw, in one fixed place, Mrs. Mackessy. Susan Dirks was patting her hand and talking at her. She was pale and dead-still. Theresa stepped forward then, blocking her out as she grabbed Howard and hugged him, weeping into his neck. When she moved away, still keeping hold of his hand, Mrs. Mackessy had gone, vanished. Having an enemy is a strangely intimate affair, and I felt, even while I was hanging onto Rafferty, that already something was missing, the canker to which I’d grown accustomed.
Rafferty grasped my wrists and adjusted me to face him squarely. “I have to rush off,” he said. “We’ll talk in a few days. We should very seriously think about suing Mackessy for damages.”
“No,” I said.
“You feel that way now, but you let it settle. You think about it.”
“No.”
“We’ll talk,” he said, leaning over to kiss my cheek. “Good-bye, sweetheart.” He whispered, “You threw me for a goddamn loop but you pulled it off. It couldn’t have gone better; I couldn’t have designed it more perfectly myself. Dirks knew if she brought it up in the cross the jurors would feel even sorrier for you. It probably made her blood pressure go off the charts to pass up the opportunity. Did you plan it? It was a coup, my dear, a coup.”
“No,” I said to his back.
That morning, walking in our woods, it seemed as if everything had been out of focus all year and gradually, very slowly, the lens was being turned, the picture coming clear. For Theresa, God was something that was outside of her, some unfathomable being who made the highway radiant. I thought in the harsh December wind that for me God was something within that allowed me, occasionally, to see. Theresa had forgiven us, forgiven me—she had done so not long after Lizzy’s death. I hadn’t known that a person could so willingly forgive, didn’t know what it meant, how it could be, what it was made of, the strange stuff called forgiveness. She had forgiven me nearly as soon as she thought to blame, so that her forgiveness was allied with what seemed a holy sort of understanding and love.
They had looked as if they belonged, Howard and Theresa, when they walked out of the courtroom together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, as if they were the ones who lived together and were going home to their supper. And I thought how much easier it would be for Howard to love someone like Theresa, someone whose trouble is clear. My misfortunes were messy, hard to pin down, brought upon me by my own hand. In the woods it seemed to