Страница 19 из 57
Before long the men from Coca-Cola had to leave for an appointment. Laura's old roommate had no other plans for the afternoon, though, and she attached herself to Marion and Phillip as they went through the clearing conducting their survey. "Do you know a Laura Byrd? Does the name ring any bells?" A good number of the people they spoke to had never heard of Laura before, but more than a few of them thought they recognized the name and almost half knew her well enough to show some surprise.
How could so many people come together in an unfamiliar city and remember the exact same woman?
It was no simple coincidence, Marion was sure of that.
By the time they gave up for the day, it was late afternoon, less than an hour before they were scheduled to meet Marion's mother for di
"You mean Laura?"
"I don't understand how all those people could have known her, Phillip. And I don't understand why she isn't here. Where is she?"
"You're just full of unanswerable questions today, aren't you?" he said. "Maybe she is here somewhere, but she just hasn't turned up yet. Or maybe she's changed so much that we can't recognize her. Or maybe she's still alive. Maybe there's a different afterlife for everybody, and this is Laura's, and we're all just waiting for her to die so that everything will make sense to us." "Don't say that."
"Or then again, maybe the man who asked us for the match this afternoon was right, and God is just out there playing games with us to see how we'll react. Or maybe it's chance. In the end, maybe it's nothing but chance." He smoothed a crease from his pants as he stood up. "There's the long answer. The short answer is, I don't know. But I'm glad we're here, Marion."
He went to the sink to wash his face. She heard him ru
He sat down beside her on the couch. She was tired and so she rested her head on his shoulder.
"This is nice," she said after a while. "You didn't really help me with my question, but this is nice."
"I know it is. It's been a long time, hasn't it?"
"What do you mean, 'It's been a long time'?"
"A long time since we could just sit together quietly like this. A long time since you would let me, or since I would risk it. You know, sometimes I look back on the last ten years of our lives, and it feels like we were nothing but roommates. I was the bumbling roommate you had to pick up after, and you were the sensitive roommate I had to keep from upsetting. I don't know what did it to us. Maybe it was Laura's going away to college, the two of us being alone together after all that time. I don't know. But that's what we were, isn't it? The crazy thing is that I didn't even notice until it was all over. It took dropping dead, of all things, for me to see things so clearly."
It sounded as though he were about to laugh, but the laugh turned into a spasmlike inhalation, and he sneezed loudly, jarring her head with his shoulder. "Whew! Excuse me. I wasn't expecting that. Anyway, that's what I mean by 'It's been a long time.' I mean I'm glad I'm your husband again. I'm glad you're my wife. If my vote counts for anything, I say we keep it that way. I must have tried to tell you that a dozen times today, when you haven't been so… frustrating."
As usual, his speech had cracked apart into a mass of springs and cogs at the end, the parts of a statement rather than the statement itself. He had left her with the impression that he was about to clarify himself but had decided to opt out at the last second. Still, she knew what he meant, even if she wasn't quite sure how to respond to him. Finally she just gave up and said what she was thinking, which was, "I didn't know you'd realized anything was wrong."
The look he gave her was as old as time. He leaned over and said, "I'm going to change out of these clothes before we head back out, okay?"
Then he stood up and disappeared into the bedroom, shutting the door.
It was a mistake for her to think of him as i
She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something – for finally getting to know him, maybe. She knew that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.
She cast the feeling aside and forced herself up from the couch. It was five-thirty, almost time to leave. She had to get dressed. Outside, the sun had all but disappeared, and the apartment had filled with those textureless blue shadows that were just a few degrees darker than the sky. She could hear Phillip snapping his jacket together in the bedroom. Each snap locked into place with a satisfying little click, much louder than it ought to have been in the falling darkness. She went to the door and prepared to knock, lifting her hand to the wood. It was an interesting sound.