Part 16 (1/2)

”Granted, it was not a good haircut,” he said. ”Still, the whole point was that you were the first woman I ever trusted to do it.”

I felt my face heating up. It was strange. After two people had been as intimate as we had, for as long as we had, shouldn't all possibility of embarra.s.sment be removed?

I picked up my heavy spoon and broke the crust on the coffee, glad to have something to do. ”It's too cool,” I said. ”I'll have to start over.”

He said something, and I thought I couldn't have heard him correctly. ”What did you just say?”

”Maybe that's something we could think about. Me and you. Starting over.”

I put the spoon down. ”Are you serious?”

”Why is that such a crazy idea?”

”It's been three years, Henry.”

”I never stopped thinking about you.”

”After you left, I spent the longest time waiting for you to come to your senses, because I was certain it couldn't just be over so abruptly. But when you didn't come back, I realized that I must have loved you so much more than you ever loved me. That was the only explanation that made any sense to me. Now you're back. I should be furious with you.”

”You never loved me more,” Henry said. ”If anything, it was the other way around.”

I shook my head. ”If that were the case, you would have tried to make it work.”

”I did try,” Henry said. ”How many times did I tell you I couldn't take another fight? You would agree with me, you'd promise not to get worked up over small things, and everything would be fine for a couple of weeks, a month, and then all of the sudden you'd come from out of nowhere with some grievance, attacking me for something I didn't even know I'd done.”

”I was like that?”

He sighed. ”Yes, you were like that.”

”I'm sorry.”

”I'm not asking for apologies. If anyone should be apologizing, it's me. Don't think I don't realize what a jerk I was in the end. Honestly, I'd understand if you didn't even want to talk to me. I'm just reminding you that I tried very hard to make it work. But every time we fought, it made me think you weren't really serious. The only explanation I could come up with was, for some reason, you wanted to drive me away.”

”I didn't want that at all.”

For a minute, neither of us said anything. I dipped the spoon into a gla.s.s of lukewarm coffee. I scooped the crust off the surface of the first gla.s.s, and went down the line until I'd removed the grounds from all nine gla.s.ses.

”It was always like this,” he said softly.

”Like what?”

”We'd begin a serious conversation, and as soon as it got uncomfortable, you would start doing something else. Laundry, dishes, coffee, whatever.”

I looked up at him. I knew he was right. For some reason, despite all of my effort, I couldn't break past a certain level of intimacy, even with Henry.

”You told me something once,” I said. ”It was early on. You said that the seed of a relations.h.i.+p's demise is always apparent, even from the very first moment. You said that if you look closely at the beginning, you will always be able to see the end. At the time it seemed sort of ridiculous. But then, during those last few months together, when we were fighting so much, I started to really think about your comment. And then I traced our entire relations.h.i.+p back to the beginning, all the way back to our first date. I wanted to find that seed, I wanted to discover the clue, the thing that foretold the end.”

”Did you find it?” he asked softly.

”No. Not at all. It wasn't there. At least it wasn't there for me. And since then, over the last three years, I've wondered whether the sign was there for you. I mean, did you notice something about me on the first date, or the first time we slept together, or h.e.l.l, I don't know, the first time we met, that told you how it might all end?”

He fiddled with a spoon on the table. ”If I tell you something, promise you won't take it the wrong way,” he said.

I was still trying to decide whether I really wanted to hear whatever it was he had to say when Mike walked into the room.

”I need you in Nicaragua again in October,” Mike said to me.

”All right.”

Mike looked at Henry, as if he'd just noticed him. ”How long since you've been down to Central America?”

”A while.”

”You should go, too. Think of it as a welcome-home gift.”

The statement hung there in the room. Mike had never been one for subtlety. When we broke up, he told Henry he was making a mistake he'd regret forever. Several times during the first month after Henry left, Mike had put his arm around my shoulders and said, ”He'll be back.”

”Maybe I will go,” Henry said. Even though I pretended to focus on the cups in front of me, I knew that Henry was looking straight at me, waiting for some kind of signal.

Thirty-four.

THE SIGN OUT FRONT WAS SHAPED LIKE A farmhouse-red cursive on a white background, Boudreaux Family Dairy. Beside that was another, temporary sign, hand-lettered on a piece of wood: Welcome to Farm Trails Weekend Pick Your Own Pumpkin Dig for Potatoes Meet Tabitha Milk a Cow!

Cool Drinks Fresh Cheese Here I turned down the lane. The driveway was flanked by pasture on both sides, bright green against the brown hills. An antique plow lay stranded in the gra.s.s. A crow was perched on top, cleaning itself in the sun. An ancient-looking horse standing by the fence glanced up lazily as I pa.s.sed. I thought of the summer afternoon right before Lila sold Dorothy, when we drove out to the stable together and Lila saddled her up for me. ”Give her a good kick,” Lila had said with her customary matter-of-factness. ”Let her know who's boss.” But when I did just that, Dorothy had taken off across the field in a wild gallop, while I held on for dear life.

Lila's horse phase seemed a lifetime ago, almost like something I'd dreamed, but driving down the dusty lane, with the fog tumbling down from the hills and Cat Stevens playing on the radio, it was impossible not to remember Lila in her riding pants, with her black sweater and black boots, ponytail flowing behind her. I couldn't help wondering how things might have turned out if she hadn't given up riding. If, instead of devoting herself wholeheartedly to math, she had done as my mother advised and kept this small hobby on the side, this pleasure that had nothing to do with her academic life. I had wondered, more than once, whether it was her ambition that was her undoing. If only she hadn't been so good at what she did, so singular of vision, surely the order of her days would have been rearranged in some significant way. After all, when it comes to the major events that shape our lives, timing is everything. Maybe Lila's schedule, altered by a fraction, would not have delivered her into the hands of her killer. And instead of spending my Sat.u.r.day touring a dairy farm in search of some elusive truth, I'd be jetting across the country to visit her at Princeton or Columbia. Maybe there would be a niece, or a nephew, or both, for whom I would bring presents. Who knows, maybe I would even have a child of my own, a husband, the whole pretty picture.

I tried to imagine what Lila would look like now, at forty-two, but all I could fix in my mind was an unsettling image of one of those age-progression sketches, dark pencil-marks indicating lines around the mouth and along the forehead. I always wondered how the artists went about selecting hairstyles for those sketches, how they settled on the decision to shorten or lengthen the hair, add or subtract bangs.

I glanced up at the rearview mirror and tried to effect Lila's off-kilter smile, activating the dimple on the right cheek and squinting up the right eye by a fraction; that was the closest I would ever come to knowing how she would have turned out, but I had the feeling it wasn't close enough. As adults, would we look more alike than we had as children, or less? Probably less.

Worse than not knowing how she would have looked was not knowing the person she would have been. Although Lila had a clear idea of how she wanted her life to turn out, there would have inevitably been some surprises. How she would have reacted to these surprises, and how her reactions would have reverberated down the years, were questions I could never answer. Lila was like an unfinished novel-two hundred pages in, just when you're really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You'll never know how the story ended. Instead, you're left with an abrupt and unsatisfying non-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose.

About a quarter mile down the road, I pa.s.sed a large shed. A few dozen cattle were lined up inside, facing the driveway, their heads thrust beneath a wooden rail, eating from a long trough. At the end of the driveway, to the right, was a small pumpkin patch, flanked by a row of red wheelbarrows and a couple of Radio Flyer wagons. Half a dozen cars were parked in the pasture. I pulled in next to a silver minivan. A young blonde woman was struggling to get two crying preschool-aged children out of their car seats. ”It's a farm!” she said. ”It'll be fun!”

I got out of my car and walked past the row of wheelbarrows, stepping carefully around patches of animal droppings. A small white dog materialized from behind a bale of corn husks-Maize Maze! a sign declared-followed by a young boy with a stick. The dog shot past me, and the boy, panting, stopped and said, ”Lady, can you help me catch Rowdy?”

”Okay,” I said, but I was relieved when a short, stocky man emerged from the maze and threatened not to let the boy milk the cow if he didn't stop torturing the dog. I could travel the world and feel completely at home, but put me on a farm with a few wheelbarrows and pumpkins, and I felt as out of place as if I'd landed in Oz.

The air was infused with the light, oddly pleasant odor of cow dung. A plume of smoke rose from a small shed several hundred yards away. Beyond the pumpkin patch, a table had been set up under a tent. A woman with a green bandana around her neck stood there looking bored.

”Sorry,” she said. ”My guys haven't shown up yet. We're not doing tractor rides until two.”

”Not a problem,” I said, wondering what it was about me that made her think I was in the market for a tractor ride.

”Want a sample?” she asked, cutting a cube off a wedge of white cheese. ”This is our Sonoma Jack. Melt this over a baked potato with a little fresh garlic and you'll think you've found Nirvana.”