One unseasonably warm Saturday in late January Val’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver and said an unsuspecting “Hello.” Carrie said, simply, “Hi.”
He’d thought she had damned him by now for his silence, his necessary relinquishment.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Uh . . . well, I think.” He smelled roses, the scent of her perfume. “You?”
“I’m okay. Today, at least.”
A background hum of traffic came over the line. “Where are you?”
“In Gettysburg. I haven’t seen your famous battlefield since I was a schoolgirl. It sure looks different in winter.” A pause. “I’d like to see you if you’ll allow it. I didn’t drive to your house in case you had company. And I thought it wouldn’t be fair to descend on you like before.”
“I don’t have company.”
She hesitated. “Will you come to me? Please. I’m parked in front of the public library. I could wait for you inside the building.”
He showered, made himself as agreeable in scent and appearance as he could while in a mild panic, and dressed in his nicest casual clothes. Driving toward her, he tried to think through everything he’d imagined saying to her if they met again, but the sentences, like branches of windblown trees, thrashed against each other in his mind.
Her Camaro, parked against the curb, gleamed under the benevolent winter sun. Val opened the library door and stopped short at the sight of Carrie standing before an immense dictionary placed atop a lectern in the center of the lobby. Her hair had grown longer since he’d seen her last. Her blue jeans were bright and new. She wore a red sweater but no coat and carried no handbag. Having turned a page in the dictionary, she lingered over the following one. She shone before Val’s stricken eyes like an emissary from a glimmering world, one distinct from, yet impinging on, the dull daily existence he inhabited. Failing to corral a grin, she cast a glance at him. “Seems like you’ve turned to stone. Must be why I haven’t heard from you in so long.”
A sob broke from him. He staggered toward her, oblivious of the other patrons, and said, “Hey.” He asked her which word she was looking up in the dictionary.
She waited to answer. “The one for what we are to each other. Or were, I guess.”
“Maybe we should step outside,” he said.
An ardent sunlight bathed the front steps. Carrie said, “You seem a little shaky.”
Val wanted to touch her, but he didn’t. “You . . . you don’t hate me?”
She shook her head at his stupidity. Smiling out at the vivid, blue, thawing day, she said, “It’s so beautiful for January. Seventy degrees, the radio said. Want to take me for a ride?”
Val nudged his car onto a winding battlefield road. The trees were stripped of leaves. They drifted through intermittent patches of sun glare and hill shade, Carrie slinging her eyes ahead to the next Civil War monument or statue. He said, “I’m glad you’ve come.”
Facing the windshield, she said, “You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
She was trying not to cry. She looked at him and asked, “What is wrong with me that we’re not together?”
He kept his car on the road somehow. When he could speak again, he said, “You have to know what I think of you.”
They drove awhile without words before Carrie answered her own question. “I’m not Irene.”
The splendid weather had tempted visitors to the more popular battlefield spots. Val thought it would be easier for them to talk if they put their feet on the ground, so he headed for a less teeming site. They parked on a side road and walked past a trio of cannons into the woods. A few minutes in—Carrie had recovered her composure and was telling Val she had bought Irene’s most recent CD, had played it over and over and studied her photograph on the jacket—he found he couldn’t bear their separateness. He took her hand to halt her and then took her into his arms. They kissed.
They backed away from each other without Val surrendering her hand. She said, “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Say what you feel. “I’ve missed you so.”
“Then why—?” She stopped. “Sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t nag you. I have missed you. That’s why I came here, in the hope that I might see you. I know it’s over. I know it must be. I know if I hadn’t surprised you at your house that morning in July, we wouldn’t be hurting like we are now.”
“I wouldn’t have been able to keep away from you,” he said.
They resumed walking, their shoes kicking up the rubble of fallen leaves. No path lay where they had chosen to go, not even a horse trail. They held hands where the brush and brambles permitted it and took turns opening spaces through the sere trellises of undergrowth. The older trees, with that look of imploring in their winter limbs, seemed to mark their way through the glimmering woods.
Carrie asked him about his colleagues and students, his life in Cana. He asked her, gently, about her divorce.
“It’s all so sordid. I’m going to have to tell a judge, some man or woman I don’t know, so many painful things. I still can’t believe it’s happening to me. And to poor Josh.”
They came to a tidy clearing littered with leaves and pine needles. The sun through the oaks, birches, and hickories felt warm on their necks. Carrie stepped back into his arms.
“You could have come to my place,” he said.
“It would have made me sad to think how different today would be from the other time.”
He wanted to absorb the hurt she felt and carry it away with him. “I’m so sorry for everything that’s wrong.”
Carrie heaved against him. Her eyes rose to his, splintered with light, then closed as she lifted herself on tiptoe and kissed him with a beseeching, blandishing, wet and warm intensity.
“Do you . . . do you want to make love?” he asked, in his rattled state picturing Irene working in her Memphis studio, as he happened to know she was doing at this hour. Picturing, too, a musty room in one of the tourist motor courts located in the outskirts of the battlefield. But Carrie had begun to pull her sweater over her head. “Jesus, Carrie,” Val let slip out. The stricken look she sent him dissolved his apprehension before the greater fear of spurning her. Within minutes they were showing their bare selves to the sky.
They remained in their hollow with no one straying near them—the crisp leaves and needles, still pungent of autumn after hard snows, their pallet; the goldenrod, wild teasel, and spurge about them flattened and bleached—long enough to confirm, as if confirmation were in question, one proof of their compatibility.
Carrie wanted to make sure he noticed. During their tramp back to his car she said, “Don’t you feel how right we are for each other?”
A soft blowing but chilly breeze had picked up, winter reminding the land of its vested authority. The brambles shook. Val maintained a walking pace in front of Carrie and cleared the way for her. “I do feel it.”
A little further on, she asked, “Why do you make love to me if you’re in love with her?”
“I don’t think that’s a fair question.”
“All right. If you love her, how can you stand being so far away from her?”
He stopped. The trees had thinned. Carrie pulled up behind him. When he turned, he saw in her expression a fear that she had gone too far. What brushed him from within like the beating of feathers was a more insistent regret for what he’d caused: Irene in Memphis, baffled by the distance he’d placed between them but broadcasting her love on a strong signal; Carrie here before him, baffled too, offering a life twinned with hers that would gratify any man’s need for heat and tenderness. Val didn’t know how to hide his sorrow from Carrie. He said, “I made a mistake when I left Irene and moved back to Cana.”
She took it full faced. Then, as in a delayed reaction, her eyes reeled to the ground. Would he never be done with hurting her? He retreated two steps and reclaimed her hand. She gave it and let him lead her to the car.
During the drive into town she said, “I guess I’m getting what I deserve.”
Too close to tears for speech, Val gripped the steering wheel tighter and questioned her with a look.
“When I’m with you I’m where I want to be,” she said. “I’m just not where you want me to be.”
What good would it do to refute her, though his heart did, or to repeat that he loved her, that he convicted himself of her pain? Still, she was waiting for something from him. With the library swimming into view, he managed to say, “Yes, you are.” It was all he had to give her, but it was the truth.
Carrie wheeled her body toward him in her seat. Pity and pardon filled her eyes. She said, “That feeling I’ve had for so long of needing you in my life has grown since the night you spent in my bed. I was so giddy the next day when Clay and Josh came home from their camping trip. They kept giving me looks over their dinner like they were worried for my reason. See, I thought I’d won. Then you stayed gone, all these months. When you didn’t even find a way to wish me a merry Christmas after all we’d meant to each other, I told myself if I had a lick of self-respect, I would need to stay gone myself. Well, look where I am.”
Val pulled into the library lot, parked away from the few other vehicles, and switched off the engine. “Must you leave? Couldn’t you stay awhile with me?”
“And prolong all this fun?” She smiled sadly, the scent of pine needles clinging to her. “You know darn well I’d love to spend tonight and every living night with you. But Josh is hiking a stretch of the Appalachian Trail with his daddy right now. When he heard today’s weather forecast, he downright begged Clay for the outing. It’s how I made time to scoot up here. I need to pick them up.” She opened her door.
Val jumped out of the car. “I’ve felt so torn all this time,” he said. “I hated not calling you. I know I can’t justify it.”
“I believe you, Val. I just don’t think I can believe in you anymore.” She pecked his lips and walked toward the Camaro.
“Carrie,” he rasped.
She unlocked her driver’s side door and stared downward for a moment, thinking. With a twitch of regret in her voice, she said, “If it were only Clay wandering in the woods, I’d let him wander.” She lifted her face. “Can’t I be just one of your girlfriends?”
“What?”
“One of two. Think about it, please. I can almost accept the idea. I’m here, you know, close by, not hundreds of miles away like Irene. Shouldn’t that count for something?” She put her hands to her ears. “I can’t let myself be late for Josh. It’s getting cold.”
Clouds like swirling dark caves and grottoes loomed over the world. Pummeled by a sudden harsh wind, Val nodded. Nodded wordlessly.
Carrie gave his face a searching look, a second sad smile, then sank into her car. Perhaps she’d discovered the word she’d been looking for earlier, the word for what they were to each other. Val stood on, feeling his life falling in on him like limbs in a forest fire, until she’d been out of sight for some time.
Richard Jacobs lives in Pennsylvania. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Sewanee Review, the Penmen Review,
October Hill Magazine, the Lindenwood Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Inscape, and the Bookends Review. He is at work on a novel.
Euphony Journal 