A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [7]
“Good. So you’re all set.”
“I am.”
Nora took a step away from him but then glanced back. “I suppose someone will mention Stephen?” she asked.
The name produced in Harrison, as it always did, a clench in his gut along with a slight oil slick of shame. He stood still and waited.
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot,” Nora added.
Harrison was silent.
“Do you remember the funeral?”
“Of course,” he said quietly.
“Grief, seen up close like that, is unbearable. It was so much worse than ours. So much more intense. It made me realize how shallowly we’d loved him.”
“Perhaps,” Harrison said, though at the time his love for his friend had felt intense enough.
“You and I haven’t spoken to each other since the night of the party,” Nora said.
“No, we haven’t.”
Nora looked at him for a moment, and he felt her scrutiny. “I wonder if this wasn’t a mistake, agreeing to have the wedding here,” she said. “Having you come is a little bit like taking a stick and poking it into a clear pond and watching the mud eddy up into the water.”
“Was the pond so clear before I came?” he asked.
“It was,” Nora said. “Yes, I think it was.”
She turned, and Harrison watched her walk away along a narrow gravel path that circled around to the front of the inn. She moved briskly, head down, though she must have known he was looking at her. And doing so, he had a sudden and sharp memory of Nora as she had been when he’d seen her walking along a side street in Maine. He’d always remembered where and when he’d met Nora, but it had been years since he’d actually been able to see it as he could now. The clarity of the image took his breath away, and he thought, as he picked up his sweater from the rocker, that other such sharp pictures might reveal themselves during the weekend to come. For a moment, he stood with his hands on his hips and braced himself, even as he admired the spectacular view.
Agnes was writing about the Halifax explosion. She’d first learned about the blast early last summer while on a short vacation to Nova Scotia, a trip arranged by her local public radio station in conjunction with the history department at Kidd Academy. Halifax in early June had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as excursions go, it had been something of a strain—an unexpected tedium made worse by dismal weather, an unending rain that had so chilled her hands and feet, she’d had to warm them up each night using the hair dryer in her hotel room. Activities had been scheduled—tours into the countryside and to museums and so on—but Agnes had been happiest when on her own. In the mornings, she would do her five-mile run, shower, and breakfast, and if there were no appealing outings that day, she would walk the streets, enjoying her temporary freedom from the routine of academic life at Kidd.
On one of those walks, she stopped at a bookstore that had in its window a copy of a book entitled A Flash Brighter than the Sun: The Halifax Explosion. Intrigued, Agnes went inside, located the book, and riffled through its pages, paying close attention to the photographs of the city in the days immediately following the blast. She remembered in particular a picture of a child sitting on a white iron hospital bed, her eyes bandaged, her hair cut short in a manner similar to the way in which Agnes’s own mother used to cut and comb her hair when Agnes was a girl: in a sort of bowl with the top of the hair drawn back into an elastic band that sat to one side of the crown of her head. There were other photographs in the book as well, of wooden buildings that had gracefully imploded and of acres of devastation, as if the city were Dresden or London in a future war.
Agnes purchased the book, tucked it into her backpack, and then walked on to a coffee shop where she ordered a cappuccino. She sat at her table, oblivious to the other patrons, and read that on the morning of December 6, 1917, a munitions ship, the Imo out of Belgium, collided in Halifax Harbor with a French freighter, the Mont Blanc, a ship carrying picric acid, benzole, and TNT to the conflict in Europe.