American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [30]
They had let him keep the same bed, although the sheets were different. Just a kind of sleeping bag that he couldn’t twist into anything. He didn’t want to anyway.
He wanted to unravel the story instead. What did the story of the photographer have to do with Joe? Who was the pregnant woman? At first Joe had seemed like a fraud to him, some wannabe artist dreaming of romance. And Vivian too, what a poseur. With her airs and so aloof. Pearl had seemed like the only real one, the only sympathetic figure. And here they were, taking this long-suffering woman for granted, ruining her life. But then he’d begun to realize what Pearl and Joe had been through and he felt sorry for them both, not just her. He could see how Joe might need some escape. He was a kind of idiot, Milo thought, but an understandable idiot. Someone he could recognize and if not forgive then at least accept. And Vivian, he began to see her too as more confused than aloof, more defensive than pretentious. And she really did care about music and art more than just about anything. He was starting to believe that. And now here she had a chance for some love. He didn’t know why she had never had any before but he knew this to be true. He could see them all from a great distance as though they were jewels in his hand, crystals that split the light into different colors and directions depending on which way they fell in his palm, where they landed, the time it took for light to land on them. He held them in his hand like tears that had spilled there and turned to gems and he watched their facets shift and their hues change and he felt no judgment and no anger toward them and no sorrow for them either. Only a pity that was more like interest, a deep concern. He wanted to know what would happen to them. He wanted to know who they really were.
Of course who could they possibly be if not some part of him, Milo Hatch, a wounded soldier living in a VA hospital? But he could not think of any way in which they were connected to him. His family had lived for generations in Maine, and their history had its own, utterly different, story. No, this story had nothing literally to do with him. It must have something to tell him, but it was not his story.
So, Joe wasn’t a fraud exactly and Honor hadn’t disappeared. Those mysteries were solved. But what about the woman breaking into the apartment? Milo thought about her and her story. She had been shaken by the verdict, her husband’s dismissal from the army. Would it ruin his career? Would the trauma hurt her pregnancy? And what did the photographer have to do with any of this? He couldn’t think of any clues other than the wedding photograph of Pearl and Joe. But that didn’t tell him much. His only hope was Honor.
He thought of her and the gems in his palm melted back into tears and the tears went flying up to his eyes and moved through him and settled back into his chest and returned to being what they had originally been, those burning embers. He hated that he couldn’t figure this out alone. He hated that the story wouldn’t move forward without Honor. Then he realized that this feeling toward her was like Joe’s feeling toward Vivian, that he needed her, or Joe’s feeling for Pearl, that she was somehow in his way. Milo recognized that neither view was fair to Honor. She was a person. She was trying to help. Then he saw her too from a distance and she was a jewel in his hand. She was like a jewel in a story that when placed in the proper location would unlock the treasure chest, the trapdoor, the secret wall. The story could not go on without her. He could not go on without her. And the light moved through her and she was strange to him, and radiant.
Honor
As it happened the man in the blue windbreaker never returned to Honor’s street. There was no sign that her existence would be anything but ordinary. She grew up. As the years passed and the