Affliction

21

ASA BROWN WORKED OUT of the Clinton County state police headquarters, a low concrete-and-yellow-brick building on the interstate a few miles north of Lawford. By the time Wade parked Pop’s shaky old stake-body truck between a pair of cruisers in the lot, it was midafternoon and nearly dark. The sky was like gray suede, and a light breeze brushed snow off the banks onto the pavement, where it swirled and curled into low white berms.

Wade got out and for a few seconds stood by the open door of the truck and studied the large dark green Fords next to it and remembered that once long ago he had considered becoming a state trooper. It was after he had returned from his hitch in the army, after Korea, and it had seemed logical to him, since he had been an MP in the army, to take the exam and study at the trooper academy down in Concord and become a statie, by God, ride around all day in one of those cruisers wearing reflector shades and a trooper hat and busting heads down in Laconia when all the bikers came in for the motorcycle races every summer, driving the governor home from the statehouse for lunch, chasing coked-out Massachusetts drivers on the interstate speeding south after a long weekend on the ski slopes. It would have been better than what he had done instead.

He had not even tried to become a state trooper. He had come home to Lawford from Korea obsessed with what he called “unfinished business,” by which he meant his love for Lillian, from whom he was then legally divorced. A year later, he was married to her a second time, his unfinished business finished, as it were, but by then he was working for LaRiviere again and building the little yellow house out on Lebanon Road for him and Lillian to live in, and he could not figure out how to become a state trooper and still hold down a full-time job and build a house nights and weekends. So he did not take the exam, which he knew he could easily pass. He remained a well driller and became the town cop instead and built the house for himself and Lillian and the family they wanted to raise.

When they got married the first time, right after graduating high school, they were both technically still virgins. A cynic might say they got married in order to sleep with each other and got divorced when they had gotten used to sleeping with each other and never should have remarried, and that would be part of the truth. But things are never as simple as cynics believe, especially with regard to bright adolescents in love. Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, through their openness and intimacy with one another, had separated themselves, by the age of sixteen, from the kids and adults around them and had protected each other while they made themselves more sensitive and passionate than those kids, until they came to depend on one another for an essential recognition of their more tender qualities and their intelligence.

Without Lillian, without her recognition and protection, Wade would have been forced to regard himself as no different from the boys and men who surrounded him, boys his age like Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman and grown men like Pop and Gordon LaRiviere — deliberately roughened and coarse, cultivating their violence for one another to admire and shrink from, growing up with a defensive willed stupidity and then encouraging their sons to follow. Without Lillian’s recognition and protection, Wade, who was very good at being male in this world, a hearty bluff athletic sort of guy with a mean streak, would have been unable to resist the influence of the males who surrounded him. The loneliness would have been too much to bear.

It was the same with Lillian: she did not want to become like her mother and all the women she knew in town, a sad oppressed lot whose only humor was self-deprecating, whose greatest fear was of the men they lived with, whose children were their ballast but weighed down their lives like stones in a shroud. Wade recognized the young thing in her, the bright delicacy of feeling and thought that every other girl her age she knew was intent on snuffing out, and she treasured him for that. She married him for that.

They married also for sex, naturally, but they never did grow used to sleeping with each other, as the cynic would have us believe. Before they were married, they made love passionately every chance they had and became sweetly familiar with each other’s bodies, knew the other’s response to the touch of hands and fingertips, lips, tongue and teeth as well as they knew their own. But true consummation, the act itself, did not take place until after they were married and lived in one of the small apartments over Golden’s General Store, and when it did, to their great surprise, pleasure and gratitude, it was a simple continuation and extension of what they had been doing all along. It was not different; it was more. And they never stopped loving to touch each other with their hands and tongues and mouths, so that, in bed in the dark, when Wade finally rose up and covered Lillian’s smooth and lively body and entered it, the pleasure of his entry and the force of it, the long sweet swing of it, was for both of them an irresistible crescendo that never failed to surprise and thrill them with its ability, like gravity, to control them.

No, he did not leave her because he had grown used to sleeping with her. When Wade left Lillian and joined the army — hoping to follow Elbourne and Charlie to Vietnam but getting sent instead to Korea — it was because at the age of twenty-one he had come to believe that by marrying so young, he had ended his life prematurely. It was the last, perhaps the only, chance he had to start over. His knowledge of himself, of his golden interior, thanks to Lillian, was of a boy whose life was not yet defined, whose potential was large but had in no way been realized. He possessed this knowledge because Lillian’s love had kept the young thing in him alive long after it had died in everyone else he knew, just as his love for her hadkept the young thing in her alive too. But despite that, here he was, living like a trapped adult, a man much older than he, a man whose life was already determined in every important way — by the job at LaRiviere’s, by the small dark apartment filled with other people’s castoffs, by the village of Lawford itself, all of it hemmed in by the dark hills and forests. This was adult life, and he was not ready to accept it.

He had started to drink heavily, usually at Toby’s after work, and had grown confused and angry. And he quickly lost his connection to that lovely young thing, the fragile humorous affection for the world that he had nurtured and kept alive all through adolescence, and he grew increasingly angry at the loss and began to blame Lillian for it. The more he blamed her, the further he flew from it, until, indeed, he was like the men who surrounded him, and one night he lashed out at her with his fists and afterwards wept in her lap, begging forgiveness, promising to be different, new, clean, loving, gentle, funny.

But within weeks, he found himself breaking his promise, horrifying himself, and he began to blame the context of his madness, his life with Lillian, confusing it with the cause of his madness, and so he left her. He drove to Littleton and enlisted in the army and went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training, and wrote Lillian a long letter from there, asking her to divorce him, saying she could use any grounds she wanted, physical cruelty, even, and they could both start over again.

They tried, both of them, to do just that. Wade got shipped out to Korea — two Whitehouse brothers in Vietnam was evidently as much as the army was willing to risk that early in the war — and Lillian went to secretarial school in Littleton and worked nights as a waitress at Toby’s Inn. They slept with other people — for Wade, there was the young woman in Seoul, Kim Chul Hee, and no one else; for Lillian, there were several men during the two years she and Wade were apart.

Two of the men she told Wade about; one she did not. I was only eleven years old then, but I knew that Lillian, briefly, was meeting Gordon LaRiviere, who was married and was thin then and attractive, and who from time to time stopped by Lillian’s apartment in town, the apartment over Golden’s store, where she had lived with Wade. LaRiviere usually came to visit her very early in the morning, and on several of these occasions I myself saw him arrive before six and leave by seven-thirty, for I had my first job that summer, working at Golden’s General Store as a stockboy, and pedaled my bike all the way into town to sweep out the store and clean the counters before it opened at seven. I was shocked by what I saw, and felt betrayed, as if I and not my brother Wade were off defending our country against the Asian Communists, and I suspect that I have not even today forgiven Lillian for her affair with Gordon LaRiviere, although she was of course quite entitled to it: LaRiviere was the married one, not she.

The other two men Lillian went out with and slept with during those years that she and Wade were divorced the first time, the men she told Wade about, were Lugene Brooks, then the sixth-grade teacher at the school, single and fresh out of Plymouth State, still single twenty years later but now the middle-aged principal of the school, and Nick Wickham, who made it a point in those days to bed all the unmarried and most of the married women in town at least once. Now the compulsion seems to have weakened, and although he still goes through the motions, it is mostly for effect. Twenty years ago, however, Nick had good looks and a brilliant smile and a sense of humor that was superior to that of most of the men in town, in that his was flirtatious and affectionate, and theirs was misogynous and violent.

Within a week of Wade’s return to Lawford, he and Lillian were sleeping together in the bedroom of the apartment over Golden’s store again and were talking about remarrying, so she confessed her affairs with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham. Wade accepted the news mildly, because she insisted that neither man had been able to please her the way Wade could, a comparison that may well have eroticized her for him.

As it happens, what Lillian told Wade about sleeping with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham was essentially true: compared to sex with him, it was boring and even a little embarrassing. He did not press her for further details, although he admitted to himself that he was curious — not about her but about the men.

When he confessed to her that he had indulged in a three-month love affair with the woman in Seoul, he lied: he said that she had meant nothing to him, except occasional mechanical sex. “She wasn’t a hooker or anything, a prostitute,” he assured her. “Just a woman who was there.” In fact, however, she had meant a great deal to him, for she had renewed that sense of himself as a child that he had obtained with Lillian when they were first together. She spoke almost no English and he no Korean, and she tried with diligence and imagination, when he was with her, which was nearly every weekend and day off he could take, to be exactly what he wanted her to be — protective but dependent, bossy but unthreatening, sexually provocative and skilled yet innocent as a child and as personal as a sister. Impossible needs for any mere mortal to meet; she failed him, eventually. He contracted a mild case of gonorrhea, and when he went for treatment, Wade learned from the doctor — a young wise guy recently graduated from Harvard Medical School who insisted that Wade provide him with the name of the woman or women he had been sleeping with: his sexual contacts, was the phrase — that she was sleeping with at least three other GI’s, two of them guys in his outfit, and was supporting her parents, younger sisters and several children of her own with the money he and the other GI’s gave her. Wade never saw her again. But he felt guilty for that: he remembered her laughter, her black hair, her sad small beautiful breasts — her very tangibility; and he knew that he had not been wrong when, during those three months, he had believed that she was as real as he and as frightened. He spoke of her only casually and with disrespect after that, however — with the guys in his outfit and, when he got home, at work and around the bar at Toby’s and at first, late at night, with Lillian.

And although Lillian felt a slight chill go down her back when Wade talked that way about his one sexual liaison during their two years apart, the only other woman he had dealt with intimately, she was nonetheless relieved: the Korean woman was different from her in a way that made the woman less than she. Just as Wade believed that Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham were different from him in ways that made them less than he. Their bargain struck, Wade and Lillian had resumed sleeping together, and a month later, they were remarried and Wade was working for Gordon LaRiviere again and arranging to buy from him a three-acre plot of land out on Lebanon Road to build a house on. Lillian quit waitressing at Toby’s, used her new secretarial skills as a part-time assistant clerk at the town hall, and stopped taking birth control pills. They tried for a long time to get Lillian pregnant, but it was not until after several miscarriages and the passage of eight years that Jill was born, to Wade’s great relief, for he had long believed that his capacity to father a child had been damaged by his having briefly loved a Korean woman. And after Jill was born, Wade almost never thought of the woman again and was sure that he could not even remember her name. Kim Chul Hee.

“Wade Whitehouse. You look like shit. What happened to your mouth — somebody clip you?” Asa Brown smiled, as if amused. He swung his feet up onto his desk and lolled back in his chair and studied Wade for a moment, as if the disheveled man with the shifting eyes and swollen jaw were an odd museum exhibit, then waved with one hand to the chair beside the desk and said, “Sit. Take a load off.”

The room was brightly lit by a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. There were several other desks, but Brown and Wade were alone in the office, which eased Wade somewhat, for he preferred to say what he had to say to Brown alone and not have to endure Brown’s tendency to play Wade against an audience.

“I’ve got some information. I’ve got something you ought to know.” Wade took his hat off and sat down and placed it in his lap. He felt like a schoolboy going to the principal’s office for questioning. He was hot inside the office with his coat still on, and he began to sweat. He fumbled with the zipper of his coat but it jammed, and he finally gave it up and twirled his trooper cap on his finger, trying to look at ease and comfortable here in Asa Brown’s territory, trying not to look the way he felt — trapped, hot, guilty, angry. This was Rolfe’s idea, he probably thought. That goddamned smartass little brother of mine who believes that all you have to do when somebody does something wrong is tell it to the cops.

“The fuck happened to your mouth, Wade? Tell me that. What’s the other guy look like? Not as bad as you, I hope. Somebody did that to me, I’d want him to look a hell of a lot worse than me.” Brown straightened one crease on his trousers with his thumb and forefinger, yanked it taut and performed the same act on the other, then gazed at both creases with admiration.

Wade shifted uncomfortably in his chair and pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack and with trembling hands lit it. Brown shoved an ashtray across the desk to him and smiled, waiting. Months later, on a bright spring morning, when I sat in the same chair as Wade, and Captain Asa Brown sat across from me with his feet up on his desk, he told me that Wade had looked like a man about to break down and confess a crime. Wade’s shoulders were slumped, his feet drawn up under the chair, knees together, his hands fidgeting with the cigarette and lighter, while he looked off slightly to the right of Brown, refusing eye contact — like a guilt-driven man who had found the burden too great to bear and had finally decided to reveal the nature of his crime and accept his punishment. Not a man come to accuse others.

Wade suddenly sat up straight in his chair, looked at Brown and said, “What I was wondering is about taking the state trooper’s test, maybe. I was wondering if I was too old for that. You know, to join the state police.”

Brown said, “You kidding me, Wade? You want to be a trooper?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I was thinking about it. I was just wondering about the test, if I was too old or something.”

Brown looked at him thoughtfully, as if considering how Wade, in his present state, would look in a trooper’s uniform. Like a man impersonating a cop, he thought, a man in costume, a drunk masquerading in a stolen uniform. “Well, Wade, I’d have to look into that for you. I think there is an age limit, but I’d have to check. What’re you, forty-something?”

“Forty-one.” Wade stood up and jammed his cap back on and put out his cigarette. “I was only wondering.”

“Well, I’ll check on that, okay? You give me a call in a day or two, Wade, and I’ll let you know.”

Wade mumbled thanks and backed toward the door. “Yeah, I’ll call you,” he said, and he turned and went out, walked quickly down the long hallway to the exit and was gone, leaving Brown at his desk, smiling and shaking his head. What an asshole, that guy. Drunk, probably, and pissed off at somebody he got in a fight with. And now he’s got it into his head that he can be a state trooper so he can bust the guy who whacked him on the jaw. He used to be a decent town cop, Brown thought, but it looks like the booze has got to him. Young for that. Too bad.

Some time later, Wade pulled off the road in front of Golden’s store. He put gas into the truck from the pump out front, went into the store and paid Buddy Golden at the register. Buddy, a thin sallow-faced man with a permanently soured expression on his face, said, “Wade,” and handed him his change.

Wade said nothing, turned and left the store.

“Friendly,” Buddy said. “Real friendly.” He stood by the register and watched Wade out the window and saw him walk around to the side of the store and heard him clump up the wooden stairs there to the landing that led to the pair of small apartments upstairs. Buddy heard Wade knock on one of the doors and heard it open, which meant that it was Hettie Rodgers’s apartment, since the other was rented by Frankie LaCoy, who Buddy knew was up in Littleton, probably buying more marijuana to sell here in town. He did not care how the goddamned LaCoy kid made his living, so long as he paid his rent on time and did not trash the apartment.

Buddy finished closing the store, flicked off the lights, locked up and went out, passing the old red truck as he walked around back toward his own car. As he strolled under the landing, he looked up and saw that, yep, he was right: no lights on in Frankie LaCoy’s apartment and several lights burning in Hettie’s. That goddamned Wade Whitehouse, he better be careful, coming around to visit Jack Hewitt’s girlfriend. If Jack catches him, Wade will have some serious explaining to do.

None of my business, he thought, just so long as they don’t trash the apartment. I’ve got to stop renting these places to kids, he decided, walking on. It was nothing but trouble. Of course, there was no one else in town to rent to, except single kids who could not afford a trailer or a house of their own and did not want to live with their parents anymore because they needed to screw each other and drink and smoke marijuana and God knows what else, and newlyweds, who never stayed long.

Hettie was surprised to see Wade. She invited him in and waited for him to tell her why he had come knocking on her door. He peered slowly around the small crowded room and tiny kitchen by the door and said nothing.

She fluffed her new short haircut at the nape of her neck and said, “What do you think, Wade? You like it short?” She spun around to show him all sides. She was wearing an aqua V-neck tee shirt and tight jeans with zippers at the ankles and rubber thongs on her feet. Just home from work, she explained, and out of that uniform they made her wear at Ken’s Kutters in Littleton. “It’s like a damned nurse’s uniform or something they make you wear,” she said. “Ridiculous. They want, like, to call you a beautician, right? So I guess they figure you have to look like you work in a hospital. It’s nice, though.” She sighed. “The job, I mean.” She chattered on nervously, feigning good cheer, while Wade prowled in silence through the apartment, looking out the window in the living room to the road below, where Pop’s truck was parked beside the gas pump.

“You all right, Wade?” Hettie asked, suddenly serious. “What happened to your face there? It’s all swollen.”

He sat down heavily on the tattered old couch, still wearing his hat and coat, and drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You know, I lived in this apartment. Twice.”

“No kidding. Twice. You want a beer, Wade?” Hettie moved toward the refrigerator. “I was just going to get myself a beer. It’s what I like to do when I first get home, change out of that nurse’s uniform they make me wear and have a beer before I start supper.” She smiled eagerly at the refrigerator door, her face a question mark. “Beer?”

“When I first got married I lived here. And then I lived here alone a few years ago. When I got divorced.” He pulled his hat off and flipped it to the end of the couch and smoothly unzipped his coat and wriggled out of it, tossing it on top of the hat.

“I know,” she said. “About after the divorce, I mean. But not about when you were married. Before my time,” she said, opening the refrigerator.

Wade agreed, it was before her time, and said maybe he would take that beer. He stood up again, moving from the living room toward the single bedroom in back, where he halted at the door for a moment and peered in. She had left the light on, and her white uniform lay rumpled on the unmade double bed. There was a three-legged dresser with a pair of bricks for the fourth leg, and several blue plastic boxes under the window were filled with record albums, and female clothing was everywhere, spilling from the dresser drawers, in piles on the floor, drooping off the ironing board in the corner. On the wall she had tacked up a poster of David Bowie in concert.

“Don’t mind the mess,” she said, handing him a bottle of Michelob. “It’s Friday, like TGIF, and I do housecleaning on Saturday. Cheers,” she said, and clinked his bottle with her own.

Wade walked back toward the kitchen at the far side of the living room, looked into it and took a long pull from the bottle. “Looks like the same furniture that was here when I lived here,” he said in a metallic voice. He looked strange, Hettie told me, when I asked her about that night, and he was acting and talking oddly, she said, right from the start, when he first came in, and she was a little afraid of him, even though they were old friends and Wade had always behaved decently toward her.

“I used to like baby-sit Jill, you know,” she explained, “so I was used to Wade and his moods, and I had seen him get pretty ugly when he was drinking. But this was different. He wasn’t ugly or anything, just strange. Like, he was all caught up remembering when he once lived in the same apartment, back when he and Lillian were first married and then later, when they got divorced. Like, it must have been hard on him, having to come back to the same apartment years later, where the marriage had first started out. I guess I told him that, about how hard it must have been for him, being his age and all, to live in a furnished little dump like this, and he must have been glad to get out of it and get his own trailer out there by the lake.”

“I’m living in my father’s house now,” he said. “Up on Parker Mountain.”

“Yeah, right. I guess I knew that. I heard Margie — your Margie, Margie Fogg — I heard she moved in with you. Nice?” Hettie dropped into a director’s chair opposite the couch, crossed her legs and swung one ankle back and forth in a circular motion, stirring the air. She was nervous, a little frightened of Wade, not trying to be provocative — although, thinking back on it, she told me, she could see how Wade might have thought differently. The truth is, she wanted him to leave and wished that she had not let him in and offered him a beer. He was looking at her as if he did not know who she was, as if he thought she was Lillian, maybe, and they were newly-weds living in this apartment together. Or he may not have known who he himself was: it was as if he thought he was Jack — he was acting the way Jack did sometimes when he was drunk, especially lately: morose, inward, cryptic. These were not exactly Hettie Rodgers’s words, of course, but they are her perceptions, essentially, as she remembered them six months later.

He moved closer to her, and she stopped twirling her leg in the air and looked up at him. Reaching out with one hand, he brushed her chin with his fingertips, then lowered himself down next to her and laid his head on her lap, facing away from her toward the shabby couch and across the cluttered room to the darkened window beyond. The room looked to him exactly as it had when he had lived here with Lillian twenty years before, and he had knelt beside her and had placed his head in her lap, and looking away from her, so that she could not see the tears in his eyes, he had begged her to forgive him. Hettie stroked his head, as if he were a troubled child, and he set the bottle of beer on the floor and reached around her legs with his arms and held her tightly.

“Wade,” she said. “No.”

“When we lived here,” he said in a low voice, “it was mostly good. There were some bad times, but it was mostly good. Wasn’t it?”

“Wade, that was a long time ago. Like, things change, Wade.”

“No. Some things stay the same your whole life. The best things that happened to you, and the worst, they stay with you your whole life. When we lived here, when we were kids just starting out, that was the best thing. I know that. I can still feel that, in spite of everything else that has happened to us.”

“Wade,” Hettie said, her voice almost a whisper. “Why did you come over here tonight?”

He was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, “Will you let me make love to you?” He released her and sat back on his heels and looked up at her face, which was filled with confusion and fear, although he did not see that. He said, “Just this one time, here, in this place. In the dark, with the lights out, and you can be Lillian, and I’ll be whoever you want. I’ll be Jack, if you want. Just this one time.”

“I can’t, Wade. I’m scared. No kidding, really. I’m scared of this. You should go.”

“In the dark I can call you Lillian, and you can call me Jack. And it will only happen this one time. I need to do that. Lillian.”

“Please. Please don’t call me Lillian.” Her eyes welled up, and tears broke across her cheeks. “You’re scaring me.”

Wade reached up and touched her hair at the bottom of her long slender neck. “You look nice with your hair cut short like that,” he said, and he reached beyond her to the light switch on the wall and doused the overhead light, a bulb hidden in a Chinese paper shade, dropping the room into darkness, with only the lamp in the bedroom showing now, casting a long plank of light into the room, so that they could see the shape of each other’s bodies but could not make out the face. And he did look like Jack to her at that moment, kneeling next to her, one hand on her thigh, the other on her shoulder, his fingertips brushing her throat. He said, “I wonder what your hair smells like now. If it smells the same as it used to when I kissed you and we made love.”

She was shaking; her heart was pounding and the blood roared in her ears.

“Lillian,” he said. “Say my name. Say it.”

“This scares me. Don’t.”

“I want you to say my name. Jack. Say it.”

“I’m afraid. I really am.”

“Lillian.”

She whispered his name. “Jack.”

He touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. “Say it again.”

“Jack.”

He took her hand and placed her fingers across his lips, and he said, “Lillian.”

He stood slowly and said, “Wait here,” and he walked into the bedroom, crossed to the bedside table and put out the light. Then he quickly returned through the darkness to stand behind her.

She said, “This scares me a whole lot. We shouldn’t do this.”

“It’s all right. We’re not who we are. I’m Jack, and you’re Lillian.” He reached down and placed his hands on her shoulders. He let his hands slide to her breasts and gently hold them, and she laid her head back against him, her breath coming rapidly now, as he moved his hands over her breasts, her nipples hardening, her hands on his, pressing them against her. Then he was kissing her neck, her ears, her cheeks and her lips, and she was kissing him back, and they were standing in the room holding tightly to one another, and in seconds they were moving through the darkness to the bedroom.

She said to me, “I knew it was wrong, but it isn’t like I was married to Jack or anything. And things had been pretty bad between him and me lately anyway, Jack and me, since that hunting accident he was involved with. I guess I was mad at him. And I liked Wade, you know, he was like an old friend, ever since I was a kid, and he had always been real sweet to me, and he seemed so sad and all. I really felt sorry for him. And it was like just this one time. I had never been what you’d call attracted to Wade, but this one night, it was different. And making me call him Jack like that, and him calling me Lillian, it was strange, like being real high, and it kind of took me over, you know?”

Wade undressed her in the darkness, and then he took off his own clothes and moved onto her, gently kissing her with his damaged mouth, drawing her warm breath into him, gulping it down. He lifted himself up on his arms, and she opened to him like a flower, and he entered her, easily, with excruciating slowness, until he was all the way in, and he felt huge to himself, as if he had gone all the way up into her chest and were touching Lillian’s heart.

Down in front of the store, a burgundy pickup pulled off the road and parked next to Pop’s truck. The road was empty and dark. The store windows reflected the flash of the headlights, while Jack sat in his truck and peered up through the windshield and saw that there were no lights on in Hettie’s apartment. Shit, he thought, and he looked at his watch in the green glow of the dashboard.

Then, wondering what the hell Wade’s father’s truck was doing parked in front of the store by the gas pump, he got out and looked inside, thinking that maybe the old bastard had passed out and was lying on the seat. Gone. Strange. The sonofabitch’s probably three sheets to the wind down at Toby’s, wondering where the hell he left his truck, Jack thought.

He moved around to the front of his own truck, and pulled a small notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket, and, in the reflected splash from the headlights off the store windows, scribbled a note and tore it from the pad. He walked heavily up the stairs to the landing and stopped in front of Hettie’s door. He studied the door for a second, and thought, What the hell, maybe she came home already and fell asleep, and he turned the doorknob. The door swung open, and Jack stepped inside.

“Hettie?” he called into the darkness. “Hey, babes, you here?” Silence.

“By then, when Jack came,” Hettie explained to me, “we were just lying there in the darkness, you know? Not saying anything, just thinking, I guess, about what we’d done. This terrible thing we’d done, Wade and me. I was really scared when I heard Jack outside, and then, when he actually came into the apartment, I jumped, and I was so scared I almost screamed. But I didn’t. Wade, he didn’t even seem to react. I mean, like he just lay there the same way, without even his breathing changing, his hands behind his head, like he was going to lie there on his back naked in bed and let Jack walk right into the room. It was weird.

“But then I heard Jack bump against something in the living room, and he swore and tried to find the light switch on the wall, you know, right by the door. But he couldn’t find it, so he backed outside to the landing again, thank God, and a few seconds later, I heard him go back down the stairs, and finally I heard his truck drive off.”

Slowly, Wade sat up and swung his legs off the bed, as if he were an old sick man. He stood and in the darkness began to dress. He and Hettie said nothing to each other, and when he was dressed, he walked from the bedroom to the couch, where he had tossed his hat and coat. He picked them up and put them on and went out onto the landing — closing the door behind him with care, as if he did not want anyone to hear him.

Jack’s note fluttered from the door to the landing. Wade leaned down and picked it up and read it: Meet me at Toby’s. I got some good news today. Love, Jack. Wade inserted the note between the door and the jamb just above the doorknob, where Jack had placed it, then went down the stairs. He started up Pop’s truck and left, heading north on Route 29, out of town, toward home.