Magic…

In the end, of course, it didn’t matter, for they separated completely, moved far away from each other emotionally. She became for him what she’d been when he was first captivated by her: the dark woman of his imagination.

Today she prodded her face in the mirror, rubbed at some invisible blemish as he remembered her doing many times. She’d always been terribly vain.

She flipped the mirror back, “Pull over, Tate.”

He glanced at her. No, it was not an imperfection she’d been examining; she’d been crying again.

“What is it?”

“Just pull over.”

He did, into the Park Service entrance to the Bull Run Baffle-field.

Bett climbed from the car and walked up the gentle slope. Tate followed and when they were on level ground they stopped and simultaneously lifted their eyes toward the tumultuous clouds overhead,

“What is it, Bett?” He watched her stare at the night sky. “Looking for an angel to help you decide something?”

Suddenly he was worried that she’d take offense at this-an implicit reference to her flighty side-though he hadn’t meant it sardonically.

But she only smiled and lowered her eyes from the sky. “I was never into that angel stuff. Too Hallmark card, you know. But I wouldn’t mind a spirit or two.”

“Well,” he said, “this’d be the place. General Jackson came charging out of those trees right over there and stopped the Union boys cold in their tracks. Right here’s where he earned himself the name Stonewall.” The low sun glistened off the Union cannons’ black barrels in the distance.

Bett turned, took his hands and pulled him to her. “Hold me, Tate. Please.”

He put his arms around her-for the first time in years. They stood this way for a long moment. Then found a bench and sat. He kept his arm around her. She took his other hand. And Tate wished suddenly, painfully, that Megan were here with them. The three of them together and all the hard events of the past dead and buried, like the poor bodies of the troops who’d died bloody and broken on this very spot.

Wind in the trees, billowing clouds overhead.

Suddenly a streak of yellow flashed past them.

“Oh, what’s that?” Bett said. “Look.”

He glanced at the bird that alighted near them.

“That’d be, let me see, a common yellowthroat. Nests on the ground and feeds in the tree canopy.”

Her laugh scared it away. “You know all these facts. Where do you learn them?”

A girlfriend, age twenty-three, had been a bird-watcher.

“I read a lot,” he said.

More silence,

“What are you thinking?” she wondered after a moment.

A question women often ask when they find themselves in close contact with a man and silence descends.

“Unfinished business?” he suggested. “You and me?”

She considered this. “I used to think things were finished between us. But then I started to look at it like doing your will before you get on a plane.”

“How’s that?”

“If you crash, well, maybe all the loose ends’re tied up but wouldn’t you still rather hang around for a little while longer?”

“There’s a metaphor for you.” He laughed.

She spent a moment examining the sky again. “When you argued before the Supreme Court five or six years ago. That big civil rights case. And the Post did that write-up on you. I told everybody you were my ex-husband. I was proud of you.”

“Really?” He was surprised.

“You know what occurred to me then, reading about you? It seemed that when we were married you were my voice. I didn’t have one of my own.”

“You were quiet, that’s true,” he said.

“That’s what happened to us, I think. Part of it anyway. I had to find mine.”

“And when you went looking…, so long. No half measures for you. No compromises. No bargaining.”

The old Bett would have grown angry or dipped into her enigmatic silence at these critical words. But she merely nodded in agreement. “That was me, all right. I was so rigid. I had all the right answers. If something wasn’t just perfect I was gone. Jobs, classes… husband. Oh, Tate, I’m not proud of it. But I felt so young. When you have a child, things do change. You become more..

“Enduring?”

“That’s it. Yes. You always know the right word.”

He said, “I never had any idea what you were thinking about back then.”

Bett’s thoughts might have been on what to make for dinner. Or King Arthur. Or a footnote in a term paper. She might have been thinking of a recent tarot card reading.

She might even have been thinking about him.

“I was always afraid to say anything around you, Tate. I always felt tongue-tied. Like I had nothing to say that interested you.”

“I don’t love you for your oratorical abilities.” He paused, noting the tense of the verb. “I mean, that’s not what attracted me to you.”

Then reflected: Oh, she’s so right-what she’d said earlier… We humans have this terrible curse; we alone among the animals believe in the possibility of change-in ourselves and those we love. It can kill us and maybe, just maybe, it can save our doomed hearts. The problem is we never know, until it’s too late, which.

“You know when I missed you the most?” she said finally “Not on holidays or picnics. But when I was in Belize-”

‘What?” Tate asked suddenly

She waved lethargically at a yellow jacket. “You know, you and I always talked about going there.”

They’d read a book about the Mayan language and the linguists who trooped through the jungles in Belize on the Yucatan to examine the ruins and decipher the Indian code. The area had fascinated them both and they planned a trip. But they’d never made the journey. At first they couldn’t afford it. Tate had just graduated from law school and started working as a judge’s clerk for less money than a good legal secretary could make. Then came the long, long hours in the commonwealth’s attorney's office. After that, when they had the money saved up, Bett’s sister had a serious relapse and nearly died; Bett couldn’t leave home. Then Megan came along. And three years after that they were divorced.

“When did you go?” he asked.

“Three years ago January. Didn’t Megan tell you?”

“No.”

“I went with Bill. The lobbyist?”

Tate shook his head, not remembering who he was. He asked, “Have a good time?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said haltingly “Very nice. It was hotter than Hades. Really hot.”

“But you like the heat,” he remembered. “Did you see the ruins?”

“Well, Bill wasn’t into ruins so much. We did see one. We took a day trip. I… Well, I was going to say-I wished you’d been with me.”

“Two years ago February,” Tate said, ‘What?”

“I was there too.”

“No! Are you serious?” She laughed hard. “Who’d you go with?”

Her face grew wry when it took him a moment to remember the name of his companion.

“Cathy.”

He believed it was Cathy.

“Did you get to the ruins?”

‘Well, we didn’t exactly. It was more of a sail boarding trip. I don’t believe it… Damn, how ‘bout that. We finally got down there. We talked about that vacation for years.”

“Our pilgrimage.”

“Great place,” he said, wondering how dubious his voice sounded. “Our hotel had a really good restaurant.”

“It was fun,” she said enthusiastically. “And pretty.”

“Very pretty,” he confirmed. The trip had been agonizingly dull.

Her face was turned toward a distant line of trees. She was thinking probably of Megan now, and the Yucatan had slipped far from her thoughts.

“Let me take you home,” he said. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight. We should get some rest. I’ll call Konnie, tell him about Sharpe.”

She nodded.

They drove to Fairfax and he pulled up in front of her house. She sat in the front seat in silence for a while.

“You want to come in?” she asked suddenly.

His answer was balanced on the head of a pin and for a long moment he didn’t have a clue which way it was going to tilt.