American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [29]
You got me.
He looked down. She could sense his expression change without seeing his face. She saw it in the line of his shoulders, the top of his head.
I tried to hurt myself while you were gone, he said.
They told me, she said. I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re still here.
Then he looked back up.
Don’t leave again.
I didn’t leave. You wouldn’t see me.
You can’t listen to me. You can’t listen to them. If I say that again, don’t listen.
What should I do?
Find me. Come here anyway.
All right. I will.
He looked at her like he knew she was going to save him.
Then he said: So what happens next?
She shrugged her shoulders. Her hair lifted up and down.
Only one way to find out.
1936
Joe was driving along a curving parkway, heading north. A white sign with green lettering said Entering Massachusetts. Vivian sat next to him reading from a piece of paper covered with a scrawl of directions. It began to rain. Light steady rain dotted the air in quick flashes, hyphenating the atmosphere, making dashes of white against the dark brown trees. November, and a silver sky was throwing out this water, indifferent to the cars, the lives, the minor tragedies and great loves below, an oblivious sky. Vivian thought they might be lost but Joe said how could they be they were supposed to be in Massachusetts and here they were. He looked over at her and smiled and the furrow in her brow melted but still she had been short with him. She had not promised anything. The trip had been his idea and she had agreed to go but she had not promised it would be easy. She went back to studying the piece of paper. She exuded always a sense that they were in the wrong. He could feel it in her hesitation. She waited a moment before answering him. She picked up one topic, then put it down before it went too far and chose another. She put her hand on his arm and then took it away, as if he were a sculpture in a museum that she had momentarily been driven to touch. He was flattered that she tried at all, that she was here at all, and he respected her wary conscience. It relieved him of the need to have much of one himself. It made it possible for him to put his energy toward persuading her and reassuring her and comforting her.
But he was also aware that this was wrong. It was just that he could not possibly stop himself. His being in this car with Vivian was as inevitable as this silver rain that kept falling. He loved her and they were having an adventure that felt as new as the trees wet and slick with fresh cold rain. Their time together felt as sad as it was exciting but it would never have made any sense to him to think that this feeling was simply him, that it was the feeling that he had been carrying around for many years and now with her it had found its perfect expression. It was not in his repertoire of ideas to consider that his feelings were not a result of what was going on around him but that his feelings actually existed somewhere inside. He was not fortunate or unfortunate enough to know that he was the source of the feeling. That was something he could not possibly have known.
When they found their way to a part of Quincy, Massachusetts, called Norfolk Downs to see the factory of the world’s greatest cymbal maker, the rain disappeared and the sky surged with blue and the air turned their faces bright and red and their eyes were clear.
2005
They put Milo in a different room. They had thought he was getting better and then when it had become clear that although his legs were improving his mind was not, they had kept him under closer observation. He was not allowed anything that could be used as rope. They kept his clothes in a separate place. He had tied several T-shirts together and when they’d asked him about it he had said he was making a scarf. For a while he had wanted to forget her and he tried but then the stories kept coming back even when she wasn’t there. Not new stories, just the same images haunting him and pulling him back into wondering, wanting to know.