The Buffalo Soldier (12 page)

SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE, TENTH REGIMENT,

UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

REPORT TO CAPTAIN ANDREW HITCHENS

AFTER THE ENGAGEMENT AT CANYON CREEK,

MAY 9, 1876

*

Laura

They drove home in the dark, though it wasn't even six-thirty when they left her mother-in-law's house. The drive from Saint Johnsbury to Cornish was a solid two hours, but still she found herself wishing it was longer: She needed time to think. It didn't matter that she was confined with him right now in the Taurus, because the vehicle was dark and they were listening to country music on the radio. They didn't have to speak--though Terry had made easily a half-dozen overtures when they first left, trying to assess the damage. Finally he'd gotten the message that she wasn't talking.

A few times the notion that her marriage might be over crossed her mind, but the thought made her a tiny bit nauseous and she would try to remember how loving he'd been lately. Yes, that kindness had made her slightly wary, but it also suggested that whatever Terry had done or was planning to do, it did not involve leaving her.

She figured she would confront him once Alfred was asleep, and he would either deny that something had happened and offer an explanation--perhaps fabricate some lesser transgression--or confess.

She realized that she wasn't sure she wanted him to confess. Would it be to a one-night stand? A weekend? Or would it be to something more profound? A long-running affair, perhaps? She wasn't convinced that she wanted to know.

A question occurred to her: How in the name of God did one have an affair at deer camp? The place was a dump, and the men degenerated into wild beasts when they were there. They rarely shaved or bathed, and they spent their days tromping around the woods.

Maybe that meant nothing had happened. Maybe Russell was just being Russell at her mother-in-law's tonight: Difficult and argumentative. A troublemaker.

And after losing as much as she had, was it even possible that she could lose her husband, too? Would she really be expected to endure that as well?

She wondered what would happen to Alfred if she kicked Terry out--or he left on his own. Right now the two of them had care of the boy, but there would be something called a case review in two or three months. Probably February, Louise said, and definitely no later than March. If their home was perceived as unstable--if she was suddenly a single mother--would she lose the boy?

Certainly she could not allow that to happen. It wouldn't be fair to Alfred, and it wouldn't be fair to her. She had no idea if the two of them had made any real progress in their relationship, but she was sure that eventually they would. Positive. It was only a matter of time.

She turned around, expecting to see a small boy asleep in the backseat of the car. She already had the picture in her head: seat belt still snug around his waist, but his body on its side on the couch, his feet drawn up onto the long cushion. She was smiling at the image. Instead, however, when she turned she saw Alfred upright and awake. At some point he had put on his CD headset, oblivious to the music on the car radio, and started listening to something else. He was staring straight at her, his face completely impassive. For a second the surprise caused her smile to wilt, and she had to will it back for the benefit of the boy.

WHEN THEY APPROACHED the turnoff for Cornish, Terry veered up and off the main road, planning to drive the final four miles via the notch way instead. It took a couple of minutes longer to loop home along this route because a part of the road wasn't paved, but it also meant that they wouldn't have to drive past the spot where their daughters' bodies had been recovered from the river. In the days after the flood, this hadn't been an issue: The River Road had had such yawning chasms that it was closed for months while it was rebuilt, and they couldn't have driven past the spot even if they'd wanted to. Soon, however, this alternate route had become a habit, a way home so ingrained in the muscle memory in their hands that most of the time neither of them even thought about why they were spinning the steering wheel to the left as they approached the notch, carefully avoiding a long stretch of the River Road.

Most of the time. Not all of the time. That night Laura thought about how she hadn't driven home along the River Road--the road she'd always taken prior to the girls' death, and the road most people used to reach Cornish--more than a half-dozen times in two years. She knew the dam was long gone, and the place where the battered bodies had lodged with the riverbank flotsam looked like nothing more than another bend in the river, but she understood also that in a heartbeat she could locate the exact spot where a pile of sepulchral debris had briefly entombed both her daughters.

She thought of Hillary and Megan's friend, Alicia Montgomery, and tried to conjure a picture in her mind of the little girl--what she looked like now. She was in the sixth grade. The family had moved to Rutland soon after the flood, and she hadn't seen any of the Montgomerys in well over a year. She knew that Alicia had been badly shaken by her friends' deaths, and had endured sweat-causing nightmares for months after the flood. Supposedly, that was why the family had moved. They wanted to get Alicia away from the sound and the smell and the sight of the nearby Gale River.

Yet sometimes Laura felt they'd moved also so they wouldn't have to run into either Terry or her at the supermarket in Durham. Those encounters grew unpleasant after the flood: Alicia's mother, Colleen, was convinced that Laura and Terry blamed her--or, in some way, perhaps even Alicia--for the deaths of their little girls. One day five weeks after the river had raged over its banks, Laura's friend Karen actually got Laura dressed and out the door to do some Christmas shopping for Terry. They only went as far as Durham, but still this struck both women as enormous progress. There, however, at the small bookstore in the village, they ran into Alicia's mother, and it was clear to Laura that something had happened since Colleen Montgomery was at her house after the funeral. She wasn't cold, but she was formal. Not curt, but reticent. They talked for less than five minutes, and even Colleen's parting embrace struck Laura as more obligatory than genuine: It seemed to Laura as if the other woman was actually careful to preserve a narrow alley of air between their two bodies when they hugged--no small feat since both women were wearing heavy parkas.

On their way back to Cornish in Karen's car, Laura asked her friend if she'd noticed it, too, and Karen admitted she had.

Survivor guilt, she offered Laura as an explanation, because Alicia had gotten off the bridge in time.

But that night in December Terry had suggested another motivation, a rationale for Colleen's desire to get away from Laura that he said didn't mean Colleen wasn't experiencing survivor guilt--he, too, believed she probably was--but that may not have been the only reason she'd been distant.

When I was in Fran's office last week, he'd said, referring to the woman who was the county's state's attorney, there was a deposition going on. It involved that fellow who was drunk when he plowed into the minivan full of kids.

Laura remembered the event well, though she hadn't thought about it since her own daughters had died. A drunken driver had tried passing a slow-moving pickup and slammed head-on into a minivan with four Cub Scouts aboard. One of the boys had died, and another had spent three weeks in the hospital. This had occurred in September, before the flood washed her daughters from her life, and Laura recalled thinking at the time that she couldn't imagine how she would have coped if she had been the mother of the little boy who died.

The man's been charged with manslaughter, Terry had continued. And after the trial, there will be a civil suit--or at least talk of one to get to a settlement. You can bet on it.

Instantly Laura understood what Terry was suggesting, and what he concluded Colleen Montgomery had been thinking--or fearing.

We're not going to sue them! she had said.

No, Terry agreed, of course we're not. But I've heard through the courthouse grapevine that the Montgomerys have spoken to David Tenney, just in case. She knew that Tenney was considered one of the very best lawyers in the county.

A few months later the Montgomery family moved, and though it may have taken yet more time after that for their fears of a civil suit to dissipate, at least they didn't have to worry about running into Terry or Laura in either Cornish or Durham.

She and Terry had talked about leaving Cornish after the flood, too, but for completely different reasons and never realistically. In the months after her children died, it had demanded a monumental effort for Laura to simply get out of bed, and there were a good many days when she didn't achieve even that. Drained by the loss of her daughters, she had lacked the energy to seriously contemplate the notion of leaving, much less finding a new house and packing a decade and a half of their lives into supermarket cartons and moving.

Besides, the lieutenant in Terry's barracks would be retiring in a few years, and Terry was a strong candidate for the promotion if they stayed in the county.

And as that first winter gave way to spring, she realized that both she and Terry were probably as happy in Cornish as they would be anywhere else. She liked her house. She realized she liked the solitude it offered. And she liked her proximity to the cemetery where her girls' bodies were buried: She took small comfort in the idea that she was near them.

You're at the shelter tomorrow, right? she heard Terry asking her now as they continued home from his mother's. His voice sounded strangely faraway, and she found herself turning toward him, her ear pressing against the headrest, as they motored up through the heavily wooded notch.

I am, she murmured.

Alfred, anything special you feel like doing tomorrow? You want to hang out with me? Terry asked. No basement insulation, I promise.

When there was no noise from the backseat, Laura turned. Perhaps he'd fallen asleep at some point, after all. Instead she saw he'd hardly moved in forty-five minutes. He was still sitting upright, now gazing ahead at the two of them.

Alfred? she said, wondering if he had heard Terry with his headset on.

Almost imperceptibly he shrugged his shoulders and said, Sure. Whatever.

Yup, you and I will do something tomorrow, Terry said. We'll do something interesting.

She realized she didn't know quite what that shrug had meant, or for whose benefit it was intended. Terry's? Hers? She couldn't tell what he really thought of a day with her husband, and, as she did often, she found herself wishing that the boy would just talk more.

BY ELEVEN O'CLOCK she was sure that Alfred was asleep, and so she put the book she was reading on her nightstand and said to Terry, Are you awake?

Without turning toward her or even moving, he answered he was.