Once when she was wearing it she had thrown her arms extravagantly around my neck, swooned her hips forward against mine, and cried that she was my blue rose and I must stroke her until she turned pink.
Remembering that hurt, and badly. “She was over on the third-base side, behind the chickenwire screen,” Mattie said, “with some guy who was wearing an old brown jacket with patches on the elbows. They were laughing together over something, and then she turned her head a little and looked right at me.” She was quiet for a moment, standing there beside my car in her red dress. She raised her hair off the back of her neck, held it, then let it drop again. “Right at me. Really seeing me.
And she had a look about her… she’d just been laughing but this look was sad, somehow. It was as if she knew me. Then the guy put his arm around her waist and they walked away.” Silence except for the crickets and the far-off drone of a truck. Mattie only stood there for a moment, as if dreaming with her eyes open, and then she felt something and looked back at me. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Except who was this guy with his arrfi around my wife?”
She laughed a little uncertainly. “Well I doubt if he was her boyfriend, you know. He was quite a bit older. Fifty, at least.” So what? I thought. I myself was forty, but that didn’t mean I had missed the way Mattie moved inside her dress, or lifted her hair from the nape of her neck. “I mean… you’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t really know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know these days, it seems. But the lady’s dead in any case, so how can it matter?” Mattie was looking distressed. “If I put my foot in something, Mike, I’m sorry.”
“Who was the man? Do you know?” She shook her head. “I thought he was a summer person—there was that feeling about him, maybe just because he was wearing a jacket on a hot summer evening—but if he was, he wasn’t staying at Warrington’s. I knew most of them.”
“And they walked off together?”
“Yes.” Sounding reluctant. “Toward the parking lot?”
“Yes.” More reluctant still. And this time she was lying. I knew it with a queer certainty that went far beyond intuition; it was almost like mind-reading. I reached through the window and took her hand again. “You said if I could think of anything you could do to repay me, to just ask. I’m asking. Tell me the truth, Mattie.” She bit her lip, looking down at my hand lying over hers. Then she looked up at my face. “He was a burly guy. The old sportcoat made him look a little like a college professor, but he could have been a carpenter for all I know. His hair was black. He had a tan. They had a laugh together, a good one, and then she looked at me and the laugh went out of her face. After that he put an arm around her and they walked away.” She paused. “Not toward the parking lot, though. Toward The Street.”
The Street. From there they could have walked north along the edge of the lake until they came to Sara Laughs. And then? Who knew? “She never told me she came down here that summer,” I said. Mattie seemed to try several responses and find none of them to her liking. I gave her her hand back. It was time for me to go. In fact I had started to wish I’d left five minutes sooner. “Mike, I’m sure—”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.
Neither am I. But I loved her a lot and I’m going to try and let this go. It probably signifies nothing, and besides—what else can I do?
Thanks for dinner.”
“You’re welcome.” Mattie looked so much like crying that I picked her hand up again and kissed the back of it. “I feel like a dope.”
“You’re not a dope,” I said. I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.
Driving home I thdught of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It’s easy to give that idea lip service, but it’s a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it’s a literal fact in one’s own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we’d been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo’s failure to conceive. “If you want a kid, you’ll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said.
“Both the odds and time are still on your side. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen four years from now. Will you ever fill the house with babies? Probably not. But you might have two, and you’ll almost certainly have one if you keep doing the thing that makes them.” She had grinned. “Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.” There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter’s bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had intended to buy. No more than she’d told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck. What else hadn’t she told me? “Stop,” I muttered. “For Christ’s sake stop thinking about it.” But I couldn’t.
When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again. Three letters had been clustered in the middle: g d I moved the 0 up to where I thought it belonged, making “god” or maybe an abridged version of “good.” Which meant exactly what? “I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,” I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring. When it didn’t, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth. As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994. What meetings had Jo put on her calendar for that month? What excuses to be out of Derry? And once I had finished with Ward, I could tackle Jo’s friend Bonnie Amudson, ask her if anything had been going on with Jo in the last summer of her life. Let her rest in peace, why don’t you? It was the UFO voice. What good will it do you to do otherwise? Assume she popped over to the TR after one of her board meetings, maybe just on a whim, met an old friend, took him back to the housejr a bite of dinner.
Just dinner. And never told me? I asked the UFO voice, spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste and then rinsing. Never said a single word? How do you know she didn’t? the voice returned, and that froze me in the act of putting my toothbrush back in the medicine cabinet. The UFO voice had a point. I had been deep into All the Wayjqom the 3p by July of ’94. Jo could have come in and told me she’d seen Lon Chaney Junior dancing with the queen, doing the Werewolves of London, and I probably would have said “Uh-huh, honey, that’s nice” as I went on proofing copy.
“Bullshit,” I said to my reflection. “That’s just bullshit.”
Except it wasn’t. When I was really driving on a book I more or less fell out of the world; other than a quick scan of the sports pages, I didn’t even read the newspaper. So yes—it was possible that Jo had told me she’d run over to the TR after a board meeting in Lewiston or Freeport, it was possible that she’d told me she’d run into an old friend—perhaps another student from the photography seminar she’d attended at Bates in 1991—and it was possible she’d told me they’d had dinner together on our deck, eating black trumpet mushrooms she’d picked herself as the sun went down. It was possible she’d told me these things and I hadn’t registered a word of what she was saying. And did I really think I’d get anything I could trust out of Bonnie Amudson? She’d been Jo’s friend, not mine, and Bonnie might feel the statute of limitations hadn’t run out on any secrets my wife had told her. The bottom line was as simple as it was brutal: Jo was four years dead. Best to love her and let all troubling questions lapse. I took a final mouthful of water directly from the tap, swished it around in my mouth, and spat it out.