Here on Earth (15 page)

“Do you want to go back inside?” Hank asks.

They can hear music playing and there’s a wash of light when Lori and Chris open the door and call out for Gwen. Gwen shakes her head no; she doesn’t want to go back. She waits on the bleachers while Hank goes in for their coats.

“I told your friends you were sick,” Hank says when he comes back.

“Good one,” Gwen says. “Not that they’ll believe it.”

They walk back to Fox Hill together, taking the long way, but that’s all right with them. They can’t wait to be on a dark, empty road and out of the village, which is so crowded for the Founder’s Day celebration. They pass right by Dimitri’s, the restaurant where March and Susanna Justice are having dinner, but they skitter by like leaves, and even though March is looking out the window, she doesn’t see them.

“Did we really order all this?” March asks when more food arrives.

Their waitress, Regina, has already brought over lasagna and baked stuffed shells, and now she’s delivering the crab-and-mushroom pizza they ordered.

“We’re pigs,” Susie says, and she asks for a second bottle of wine.

Although March would never have placed her, she and Susie went to school with Regina, who recognized March as soon as she walked through the door.

“I don’t remember anyone,” March says when Regina has gone off for their wine.

“Yeah, well, you had one person on your mind and he took up a lot of space.”

Now March recalls why she hated Susie when they were kids.

“You’re judging me. It must run in the family.”

“I’m not at all. Okay, I used to, but I’m not anymore. I’m only saying that you were in a Hollis-induced fog.” Susie sprinkles Parmesan cheese onto a piece of pizza. “You never seemed to notice that my father was over at your house constantly.”

For several days, March and Susie have been dodging around this subject, on the phone and in person; it’s definitely not a comfortable topic for either of them.

“He was always at Fox Hill, allegedly on business.” Susie sighs. “Why do you think I hated you?”

“I thought I hated you.” March sticks out her tongue and Susie laughs, but then Susie looks sad and she pushes her plate away. “You knew about them all the way back then?” March asks.

“I knew right after your father died. My dad kept going over there, every single night, for weeks. Maybe he was in love with her for ages before that, who knows? Maybe they’d already been lovers for years. But I knew because one night I saw him when he came home from your house. It was about ten o’clock and I was supposed to be in bed, but I was looking out the window. My mom was downstairs listening to the radio; she was used to him being out late. He turned off the headlights of his car; then he got out and he walked over to the roses, which were especially beautiful that year, and he ducked his head to smell them, and I knew. He looked like someone else entirely, standing there. He looked like someone who was in love with a woman he couldn’t have. I cried myself to sleep, because I knew.”

“No wonder we hated each other,” March says. She reaches across the table and takes Susie’s hand.

“All I can say is, I’m glad my mother never found out.” Susie squeezes March’s hand, then withdraws it so she can get a Kleenex out of her purse. “I’ve really tried not to be angry at him, but I don’t think I could have been so generous if my mother had known.”

“Have you ever talked to him about it?”

“Him? My father?” Susie wipes her eyes, then blows her nose. “Are you crazy? You don’t talk to my father, you listen.”

Regina brings over desserts—on the house: chocolate mousse with sugar cookies wedged in along the side of the bowl, and a helping of plum pudding, in honor of the Founder. Regina sits down with them for a minute to talk about old times and discuss her pet project—the Harvest Fair down at Town Hall. Somehow, before Regina goes back to work, March finds herself announcing that she would consider running a booth that will raise funds for the children’s section of the library.

“Why did you do that?” Susie asks, when they’ve gotten their coats and paid their bill—with a thirty percent tip for Regina. They’ve left behind half-portions of everything they ordered, and are stuffed all the same. “You won’t still be here for the Harvest Fair. If you want my opinion, you should go home right now.”

“Well, thanks,” March says as they go outside.

The wind has died down a bit, but it’s still a raw night.

“When you come back to a town like this, people think you’re staying,” Susie says.

March wraps her scarf around her throat. “I don’t care what people think.”

“Okay, forget people. How about Richard?”

“Who?” March teases.

“You’re deranged.” Susie links her arm through March’s. “You’d better get serious.”

“I’ve been serious for so long I can’t stand it.” If she hadn’t been so serious, would she have agreed to come back to him, even though she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy? By then, she’d already lined up a baby-sitter and a diaper service; she had registered in a new mothers’ exercise class. Could she have booked a flight to Logan anyway? Could she have tried? “I need a break from my life, that’s what I’ve realized.”

This, of course, is what she’s been saying to Richard—it’s only a break; it’s nothing, only a little time apart.

“The definition of a break is a rupture,” Richard said to her, only yesterday, an answer which, of course, drove March completely crazy.

“What if Richard jumped on a plane? What if he arrived in the middle of the night and said you had to leave with him?”

“He’s taking his graduate students into the field next week, and he’d never disappoint them. Even if he wasn’t scheduled to do that, he wouldn’t appear in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t tell me what to do. Richard’s not like that.”

“Exactly,” Susie says. “I should have married him.”

They head for Susie’s truck, parked down the street from the Lyon Cafe, which is all but overflowing.

“What a party,” March says.

“Every drunk in town. Except for Alan. This is Hollis’s turf.”

“Thanks for sharing that.”

March gets into Susie’s truck and slams the door. Just hearing his name stirs everything up for her. It’s even colder in the truck than it is out on the street. March turns up her collar; she’s had too much wine with dinner, she realizes that now.

Susie comes to sit behind the wheel. “Look, if you want to kid yourself, fine. If you want to put something over on Richard, okay. But don’t think you’re going to fool me. You’re here because of Hollis. I don’t understand it, but I guess I don’t have to. Maybe you need to see him, to make certain he doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“I’m glad that being a reporter for The Bugle entitles you to psychoanalyze me.”

March opens the door, and without a look back, she heads off down the street. She’s furious, but when she really thinks about it, she’s angry because Susie is right. March is drawn to the Lyon Cafe, only a few steps away now, in hopes of seeing Hollis. Susie knows her far too well, although March herself isn’t certain whether or not she’ll really have the courage to act on her impulse, until Susie honks her horn, trying to get her attention. That’s when March walks through the door.

When March was growing up, the Lyon was a place other people’s parents went to, and only occasionally. It was an embarrassment to be a regular here, something no one wanted to admit. The draw of the Lyon certainly wasn’t the decor, which is still Naugahyde and wood paneling, with three deer heads attached to the wall above the rest rooms and public telephones. You came here to get drunk, simple as that.

Tonight, the place is packed; there isn’t a table to be had, so March makes her way to the bar, excusing herself politely, and when that does no good, finally pushing her way through. She signals to the bartender, and once she gets his attention, shouts her request for a glass of red wine.

It takes a while to adjust to the noise level. There’s a Celtics game on the TV above the bar, and a loud, cheerful argument going on right next to her—something to do with borrowing a motorboat—which may well turn nasty as the night progresses. There’s a jukebox going too, although all anyone can hear of the music are the drums and the bass, pounding. March grabs a stool when one of the guys next to her finally leaves, and at last, she can sit down and look around. Maybe Susie’s wrong; March can’t imagine Hollis in this drunken crowd, playing darts or debating the merit of the Celtics’ back court.

Susie has come into the Lyon, and she easily makes her way to the bar, since she knows most of the people drinking here tonight. “Hey, Fred,” she says to the bartender. “I’ll have what she’s having. What is it you’re having?” she asks March. “An anxiety attack? Sheer lunacy?”

“Red wine.” March grins.

“That’s what I’ll have,” Susie tells Fred. “You know,” she says to March, “if you had your own car, I would have left you here. For spite.”

“You could, you know,” March says. “I’m perfectly fine. And besides, he’s not even here.”

“Oh, yes he is.” Susie nods to a comer. “He’s right there.”

Be careful what you wish for, Judith used to say to March all the time. But it seems that March has already decided not to be careful. At least, not tonight.

“At the last table.”

He’s got his chair propped up against the wall, and although there are five other men sharing the table, he doesn’t appear to be in the same universe. Certainly, he’s not listening to those men. He’s been watching March Murray ever since she walked through the door.

March turns away so quickly that she knocks over her glass, then has to wipe at the spilled wine with a cocktail napkin.

“It’s not too late to leave,” Susie urges.

March would have missed him entirely if he hadn’t been pointed out to her, but now that he has been, she realizes that the difference between him and the other men at his table, most of whom are employed by the Department of Public Works, is not so much in what can be seen. Those men are also wearing old boots and jeans, and like him, they haven’t bothered to remove their coats, since people who come to the Lyon like to pretend they won’t be staying, even if they’ve settled in for the night. The difference is that the air around him seems charged, perhaps by anger, by heat and light. The difference is the way he can look at someone, the way he’s staring at her right now. One look from him is more substantial than the wooden bar she’s leaning her elbows upon. It’s realer than the bottles of whiskey lined up behind the counter; realer than the pull of fabric as Susie tugs on her jacket.

“You don’t want to finish this game,” Susie shouts, because the argument next to them concerning the motorboat is getting more heated. “Let’s get out of here.”

At the moment, March doesn’t need much convincing. She’s shaking, she really is. She’s putting something on the line, and she’s frightened by her own actions. Wanting to see Hollis and actually being in the same room with him are two different things entirely. Now that they’ve decided to leave, it’s not easy trying to make their way to the door. The place is packed, incredibly crowded and smoky. Susie is waylaid by Bert Murphy, the sports editor at
The Bugle,
and while Susie is enmeshed in some newspaper gossip, March looks back at the far end of the room where Hollis had been sitting, in spite of her resolve to get out of the Lyon with no damage done. But he’s not there, and the effect of his absence is that her heart drops into her stomach, where it stays until she realizes that he’s walking right to her.

It is sometimes possible to look at a person and see inside, although this happens so rarely it’s always a shock, like a form of electricity traveling from one soul to another. It can only be glimpsed for an instant, but in that instant you can see the core of a person, even in the middle of a crowded barroom, as he comes up beside you, while the jukebox is playing a country-western song you’ve never heard before and will never forget. It happens quickly—seeing all that hurt and disappointment—it’s as fast as a breath drawn and released. Just as fast, he closes up; you couldn’t get inside Hollis for anything now. Not with a hammer or a chisel; not by begging on your knees.

“I never thought I’d see you here,” Hollis says. For some reason, March can hear him perfectly above the din. “Not your kind of place, is it?”

“Maybe it is,” March says. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.” She wishes she had thought to wear something other than this dreadful black sweater and an old pair of jeans; she wishes she had combed her hair. “I hear you’re letting my daughter ride one of your horses.”

“Is that your daughter?” Hollis acts as though he hadn’t the faintest idea.

“As if you didn’t know.” Why is it that he still has to look so good? What gives him the right to talk to her with such arrogance, as though after all these years he continued to be the most important thing in her universe, the single shining star?

“Did she tell you I was still waiting?”

“Oh, sure.” March tries to be lighthearted, but that’s not the way she feels. “And I’ll bet you never looked at another woman again.”

People are pushing by them and there’s absolutely no privacy, so when Hollis nods March follows him over to a less populated space, beneath the mounted deer heads. The only people who crowd them over here are those weaving past on their way to the rest rooms. One guy, who’s quite loaded, greets Hollis and thanks him for his support on the town council, but Hollis doesn’t even acknowledge the council-man’s existence, and March is so distracted that if she were ever asked to identify the guy in a court of law, she wouldn’t be able to. She didn’t even glance at him. Standing there, she can feel the reverberation of the jukebox in her legs. Susie is right—she’s crazy. She’s completely deranged.

“You’re the one who didn’t wait,” Hollis says.

Over by the door, Susie spots March and she waves like mad, but Hollis has moved closer, blocking Susie from view.