The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [106]
“What made you change your mind?”
“You. Last night. When you jumped into the water.”
“Dove.”
“Dove into the water. You did that for yourself, didn’t you?”
She is silent. Even with the ocean between them, she can smell the boy — that warm toast scent, and something else. Of course, a laundered shirt.
“I’m a fallen woman,” Linda says, only partly joking.
“Magdalene,” he says, half turned toward her and steering with one hand.
“That was the name of the home,” she says.
“Really?”
“They’re always called Magdalene.”
“You’re a Catholic.”
“Yes. You’re not?”
“No.”
“How do you know about Magdalene?”
“Everybody knows about Magdalene,” he says.
“Do they? I always thought she was an especially Catholic idea.”
“Do you go to church regularly?”
“That’s a personal question.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, I do.”
“And Confession?”
“Yes.”
“What do you confess?”
She is unnerved by his questions. No one has ever probed her quite like this. Not even the nuns. Their questions were predictable and rote. A catechism.
“I’m just asking,” he says, somewhat apologetic. “What a girl like you would possibly have to confess.”
“Oh, there’s always something,” she says. “Impure thoughts, mostly.”
“Impure meaning what?”
“Impure,” she says.
______
Thomas takes her to a diner on the beach and leads her to a booth near the entrance with seats as red as those they’ve just left. She is embarrassed about her hair, which she tries to finger-comb in the sun visor. Thomas looks away while she does this. Her hair is hopeless, and she gives it up.
“Next time, I’ll bring a scarf,” he says. “I’ll keep it in the glove compartment.”
She is elated by his assumption that there will be a next time.
______
She might not have eaten in years. She eats her hamburger and fries, his cheeseburger, drinks both milkshakes, and witnesses the first of dozens of meals that Thomas will hardly touch.
“You’re not hungry?” she asks.
“Not really,” he says. “You eat it.”
She does, gratefully. It seems there is never enough food at home.
“I know Michael. We play hockey together,” Thomas says.
Varsity Hockey 2, 3.
“You’re playing already?” she asks.
“Not yet,” he says. “We’ll start soon. I see Michael around.”
“Do you have cousins?” she asks flippantly.
“Hardly. Only two.”
“Let me guess. You’re Episcopal.”
“Nothing, really. Why don’t you live with your parents? Did something happen to them?”
“My mother died,” she says, mopping up the ketchup with her bun. “In a bus accident. My father just sort of disappeared after that.”
“Broken heart?”
“Not really.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
He asks her if she wants anything else to eat.
“No,” she says. “I’m stuffed. Where do you live?”
“Allerton Hill,” he says.
“I thought so.”
He looks away.
“Did we go by your house?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you point it out?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
______
Later, he says, “I want to be a writer.”
This is the first of a hundred times someone will tell Linda Fallon that he or she wants to be a writer. And because it is the first, she believes him.
“A playwright, I think,” he says. “Have you read O’Neill?”
She has, in fact, read Eugene O’Neill. A Jesuit priest at the Catholic girls’ school made the class read Long Day’s Journey into Night on the theory that some of the girls might recognize their families. “Sure,” she says.
“Denial and irresponsibility,” he says.
She nods.
“The fog. The obliteration of the fog.”
“Erasing the past,” she says.
“Right,” he says, excited now. “Exactly.”
______
He sits sideways in the booth, one long leg extended.
“Did you write your paper yet?”
“God, no,” she says.
“Can I read Keats to you later?”
“Keats?”
From time to time, boys who know Thomas come by the booth and kick Thomas’s foot or rap their knuckles on the Formica tabletop. No words are ever exchanged,