Страница 66 из 67
He climbed into the car and drove back toward Belltower.
To the hollow central mystery of his life now: Joyce.
He found her on the Post Road, hiking to the little grocery up by the highway.
He stopped the car and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed inside.
By Tom’s calculation she had turned fifty in February of this year. She’d gained some weight, gained some lines, gained some gray. She wore a pair of faded jeans a little too tight around her thighs; a plain yellow sweatshirt; sneakers for the long hike up the road. The marks of time, Tom thought. Her voice was throaty and pitched lower than he remembered it; maybe time or maybe some hard living had done that. Her eyes suggested the latter.
She looked at him cautiously. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”
“Neither was I.”
“Still pla
He nodded.
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“We can talk,” Tom said.
“You haven’t been around much. Well, hell. It must be a shock, seeing me like this.”
It was true, but it sounded terrible. He told her she looked fine. She said, “I look my age, for better or worse. Tom, I lived those twenty-seven years. I know what to expect when I look in the mirror. You woke up expecting something else.”
“You left,” he said. “Left before I had a chance to say goodbye.”
“I left as soon as I knew you’d be all right. You want to know how it went?” She settled into the upholstery and stared into the blue September sky. “I left because I didn’t trust the co
“I left because Ben told me the tu
“It’s not your fault, not his fault, not my fault. The point is, I couldn’t leave behind what happened with you and me and this place. I tried! I really did. I tried all the good ways of forgetting. And I lived a life. I was married for five years. Nice guy, bad marriage. I did some professional backup vocals, but that was a bad time …I drank for a while, which kind of screwed up my voice. And, you know, I marched for civil rights and I marched against the war and I marched for clean air. When things leveled out I took a secretarial job at a law firm downtown. Nine to five, steady paycheck, a
“Bought plane tickets six months in advance. Gave notice. I don’t know what I hoped or expected to find, but I wanted it real bad. Well, the flight was delayed. I missed a co
“Saved my life,” Tom said.
“Saved your life and drove on down the road and checked into a hotel room and sat on the bed shaking until noon the next day. By which time my younger self had gone home.”
“Then you came back,” Tom said.
“Scared hell out of Doug and Cathy. Ben didn’t seem too surprised, though.”
“You still wanted something.”
“I don’t know what I wanted. I think I wanted to look at you. Just look. Does that make any sense? For most of thirty years I’d been thinking about you. What we were. What we might have been. Whether I should love you or hate you for all this.”
He heard the weariness in her voice. “Any conclusions?”
“No conclusions. Just memory in the flesh. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”
“I’m the one who should apologize.”
He pulled into the lot in back of the grocery store and parked where a patch of sun came shining through a stand of tall pines. Tom decided this woman was Joyce, unmistakably Joyce despite all the changes; that he had walked into one more miracle, as pitiless and strange as the others.
She squinted at him through a bar of sunlight, smiling. “Catherine said there’s a sale on seed packets here. It’s too late for a garden, obviously, but the seeds stay good if you keep them in a refrigerator.”
“Seeds for Ben to plant? He talked about a garden.”
“For me to plant. I might be staying here. Ben offered me a job.” She paused. “His job.”
Tom turned off the engine, looked at her blankly. “I don’t get it.”
“He’s going home. I think he deserves it, don’t you? He offered me as a replacement. His employers agreed.”
He considered it a moment. “You want this?”
“I think I do. Ben says it’s lonely work. Maybe I need some lonely work for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Eight years. Then the terminal’s closed for good. There won’t be anything in the basement but Gyproc walls. Weird thought, isn’t it?”
Eight years, Tom thought. 1997. Just shy of the mille
“I can do eight years,” she said. “I can hack that.”
“What then? They pension you off?”
“They rebuild me. They make me young.” She shook her head: “No, not young. That’s the wrong word. They make my body young. But I’ll be nearly sixty, no matter what I look like. That might be hard to deal with. My theory is that it shouldn’t matter. On the inside you’re not old or young, you’re just yourself, right? I won’t be a callow youth but I won’t be something monstrous, either. At least that’s what I believe.”