Anything Is Possible(22)

“I don’t know anything about my husband,” Linda said coldly. Through her sunglasses she watched Karen-Lucie look out the window as though looking far into the distance; Linda saw the pretty eyes redden.

Karen-Lucie nodded slowly. Quietly she said, “Oh, child, of course. I am so sorry.” She turned her gaze toward Linda, though her focus still seemed far away. “I am in no position to tell anyone how they ought to be cognizant and aware of what their husband is up to. I have thrown stones in a glass house, and I am sorry.”

—

Almost always it’s a surprise, the passing of permission to enter a place once seen as eternally closed. And this is how it was for a stunned Linda, who stood that day in that convenience store with the sun falling over packages of corn chips and heard those words of compassion—undeserved, for if Karen-Lucie had not known her husband’s state of mind, Linda knew her own husband’s state of mind too well—and sensed in them what would turn out to be true: that Yvonne Tuttle and Karen-Lucie would never return to town, there would be no trial, no mention of cameras, and Linda would live with her husband in a state of freedom, because he would always know, as they watched the news at night, took walks through the countryside, or sat in a restaurant and chatted, that his exemption from trouble was possibly or partly the result of his wife’s discretion, and there would be no more women after that, the guestroom perhaps a sunny study neither would enter, a photograph of Karen-Lucie’s cracked plates on the wall.

The essence of this Linda felt that day. She removed her sunglasses to stare into the eyes of this woman; she wanted to reach for her hand. She even wanted—with a sudden surprising urgency—to caress her cheek, as though Karen-Lucie were the Pretty Nicely Girl who had suffered the blow from behind, who had come home from school and found her mother gone, thinking she had been important, loved all along.





The Hit-Thumb Theory


Waiting for her to arrive, Charlie Macauley watched from the window as twilight began to gather. Along the top of the soot-darkened wall of the parking area, barbed wire lay coiled, as though even the littered and unlovely motel lot posed such threat—or value—that it was immediately at war with the rest of the world. For Charlie, this seemed to prove the futility of the dreams presented in the department store windows he had walked by earlier, in this town they had found together, half an hour outside of Peoria: You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one’s contribution to the world was only more excrement.

But there to the left was the top of a maple tree, the branches holding forth two pinkly yellow leaves with apologetic gentleness, and how had they held on until November? Right behind it was the last of the day’s full light; generously, the colors from the setting sun sprayed upward over the open sky. Charlie put his large hand to the side of his face, remembering—why should this come to him now?—crouching on a small hillside, planting crocus bulbs with Marilyn in the same kind of autumn light. It had been their freshman year at the university. He remembered her eagerness: her eyes large with intent. He had known nothing about planting crocus bulbs, and these, she told him, short-breathed with excitement, would be her first. They had bought a trowel in town that afternoon, and walked up the small hill behind her dormitory to a patch of autumn grass next to the college woods. “Okay, here,” she said, really anxious. He had seen how serious this was for her, planting her first flowers at the age of eighteen, with him, her first love— He had been moved by her eagerness, bundled up as she was in her long woolen coat; they dug the holes, put the bulbs in. “Bye, bye, good luck,” she had said to one bulb. The very stuff that would make him roll his eyes now—her utter foolishness, the useless, nauseating softness that lay at the center of her—had thrilled him quietly that day with a rush of love and protectiveness as the autumn smell of earth filled him, kneeling there with the trowel. Dear, befuddled Marilyn, her face flushed with the excitement of the job done. “Do you think they’ll come up?” she had asked worriedly. The poor thing, always worried. He said they would. And they did. A few did. But he could not remember that part as well. He could only really remember what he had long forgotten until right now: a day of innocence in autumn when they were just kids.

Charlie closed the window blinds. The blinds were plastic slats, dirty with age, and they clicked into place unevenly as he tugged on the cord.

Panic, like a large minnow darting upstream, moved back and forth inside him. He was suddenly as homesick as a child sent to stay with relatives: when the furniture seemed large and dark and strange, and the smell peculiar, each detail assaultive with a differentness that was almost unbearable. I want to go home, he thought. And the desire seemed to squeeze the breath from him, because it was not his home in Carlisle, Illinois, where he lived with Marilyn that he wanted to go home to, his grandchildren right down the street. And it was not his childhood home either, which was in Carlisle as well. Nor was it their first home as newlyweds outside of Madison. He did not know what home it was he longed for, but it seemed to him as he aged that his homesickness would increase, and because he could not tolerate the Marilyn he now lived with—a woman who nevertheless filled his estranged, expatriated heart with pity—he did not know what he would do, and the minnow darting through the stream of his anxiety landed briefly on his current Carlisle home with his grandchildren down the street, swam to the golf course where he did still sometimes enjoy the expanse of green before him, swam to the woman who might or might not show up here with her head of dark, glossy hair—and not one place seemed stable.