On Claire’s last morning at home, Nora stood at the window and watched her walk slowly through the meadow, trailing her fingers among the flowers as she went, then slip through the trees onto the lake path, Astro trotting along happily behind her. Later, Claire stood in the yard, throwing his Frisbee for nearly an hour, ruffling his fur, leaning down to let him lick her face each time he returned and laid it at her feet.
In the afternoon, they went to the nursing home, where Claire knelt beside her grandmother and talked to her quietly, remembering happy moments they’d shared, while Jo gazed at her benevolently, confused. “Is it okay with you if I go over to Dylan’s for a little while, to help him pack?” Claire asked, exiting into the sunshine. “He’ll give me a ride home in time for dinner.”
“Sure,” Nora said, and watched her walk up Main Street, heading for the house he was sharing with some other college students for the summer. He had little to pack, Nora knew. A duffel’s worth of clothes, a few books, his computer, stereo, CDs. Claire just needed to be with him; they’d been inseparable since he arrived in May, and she probably could no longer imagine a day without him somewhere in it. Maybe she’d talk to him about how it had hurt her to say goodbye to Jo, how she dreaded leaving Nora and Charlie the next morning and just wished it were over, the two of them already in his truck, driving south. Maybe they wouldn’t talk at all but would fall into each other’s arms and make love in Dylan’s room for the last time. Another last, she thought – one she hadn’t considered till this moment.
Halfway to her car, Nora turned and headed for Diane’s shop, hoping that by this time of afternoon it would be empty – the tourists back in their cottages, napping, the Traverse City ladies on their way home to fix supper for their families. It was. Diane appeared at the door of the storeroom when the bell rang with Nora’s entry.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Show me some paint chips for the girls’ room – or something, would you?” Nora said. “I swear to God, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown before Claire actually leaves tomorrow morning.”
Diane peered at her over the half glasses she wore for reading or working at the computer. “You look all wound up.”
“I am,” Nora said. “Can you walk? Just a half hour or so. Enough to – I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” Diane said. “Just let me close up here. And, ha! Be careful what you ask for. I do happen to have some paint chips for you to look at.”
“Good,” Nora said. “Give them here.”
Diane fanned out a dozen or so, all shades of green, and handed them to Nora. “Mo says I should stop looking at the names and just look at the colors,” she said. “But I mean, really, under the circumstances, don’t you think it’s a better bet to paint the room something like ‘Green Thoughts’ or ‘Oatlands Spring Kiss,’ as opposed to, say, ‘Grassy Knoll’? Even if we like ‘Grassy Knoll’ a lot?”
Nora laughed. “I’m with you,” she said.
“Seriously,” Diane said. “What do you think?”
Nora looked at the color chips. “ ‘Frosted jade’? ‘Grass Root’? I like those. And ‘Aspen Field.’ It’s cheerful, the color of a Granny Smith apple. ‘Green Thoughts’ is good, too.”
“I think, any of those,” Diane said. “With a kind of mossy pink trim? Or maybe pale, pale blue?” She rolled her eyes. “I told Mo, ‘Grassy Knoll’ with red trim. She was not amused.”
“I’m amused,” Nora said.
“Of course.” Diane grinned. “I knew you would be. I counted on it.”
She took the paint chips back, set them on the counter near the cash register, then locked the front door and put the “CLOSED” sign in the window. Nora was already feeling better when they slipped out the back door and set out walking. The route to the beach took them past the rundown clapboard house where Dylan lived with his friends. The front windows were open, music pouring out of them – something Nora didn’t recognize.
“Claire decided to go over and help him pack after we saw Jo.”
“Right,” Diane said. “The same three tee shirts he’s been wearing all summer? That should take, maybe, twelve seconds.”
“I know. I know. It’s not even like it upsets me, or even worries me that, well, you know. It’s –”
“You’re jealous,” Diane said. “Hey, aren’t we all? God. They’re just so – alive.”
It was near four o’clock and, at the public beach, mothers were packing up their coolers and blankets and beach chairs. Cranky, sunburned children trudged through the sand, laden with buckets and shovels, dragging rubber rafts behind them. At the shoreline, a young woman threw a pink rubber flip-flop into the lake for a shaggy, tail-wagging mutt that plunged into the waves and swam after it.
They headed north, walking at a brisk pace on the narrow strip of flat, wet sand at the water’s edge, skipping sideways to avoid the occasional wave that washed up high enough to threaten their dry shoes. The sun was strong from the west, glittering the water where it slanted down. The rainbow sail of the little sunfish skittering by glowed with it. The wet Petoskey stones shone as if someone had polished them.
“So, you’re a wreck,” Diane said, when they’d gone a ways. “How’s Charlie doing?”
Nora shrugged. “You probably know more than I do,” she said. “What does Mo say? He’s not talking to me. Is he talking to her?”
Diane smiled. “They . . . commune,” she said. “Honestly, do you think two less verbal people ever lived? I shudder to think what would have happened to them if Betty’s fantasy had actually come true and they’d gotten married to each other. Can you imagine it?”
Nora could, actually – and thought Charlie, at least, would be quite content in a relationship that made such small use of words.
“I have to drag things out of Mo,” Diane went on. “I swore when I left Bob that I’d never, ever get into those never-say-anything-you’re-really-feeling kind of relationships again. Enough! She hates it, but the truth is I’m good for her and she knows it – though, I suspect Betty feels pretty much the same as Bob’s mother did about me.” She sang a bar of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
“That’s you, all right,” Nora said.
Diane laughed. “I shouldn’t complain. I sure as hell wouldn’t be closing up the shop early to go walk on the beach if Mo weren’t so careful with her money. I wouldn’t have the shop. She wouldn’t be working for Charlie at minimum wage. Not that –”
“It’s okay,” Nora said. “I know what you mean. And I know Mo’s a . . . comfort to him. I’m grateful for that.”
“She doesn’t talk about him,” Diane said. “I’d tell you if she did.”
“I know that,” Nora said.
Diane looked at her. “Did something happen between you and Charlie?” she asked.
Nora shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.” Nothing. That’s the problem. He’s so – quiet. It’s like he’s not even there.”
“He’ll come around once Claire is gone,” Diane said. “Poor guy. I watch him look at her and, my God, it’s like he’s looking at someone he knows is going to die. And Jo. That’s got to be part of it, too. None of us was prepared for that. What I think is, he’s been hijacked by his emotions and doesn’t have a clue what to do about it.”
“I do think he’ll be better once she’s gone,” Nora said. “Different, anyway. He has to be. But how are we going to get used to being just us, without her?”
“You will,” Diane said. “Nora, you will.”
They walked quietly all the way back to town, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Diane, perhaps, fixing up the apple green room she meant to make for her daughters in her mind’s eye. Nora hoping Diane was right, that life with Charlie would get better once their dread of Claire’s leaving dissolved into her actual absence.
She fixed an early dinner – fried chicken, tomatoes from the garden, corn on the cob. Warm peach cobbler made from Jo’s recipe. Everything her daughter loved. Claire was beside herself with excitement. She couldn’t wait to meet her roommate, Emily. She hoped she hadn’t forgotten to pack anything. This time tomorrow she’d be there!
The naked sadness in Charlie’s face made any annoyance Nora had felt toward him give way to the urge to protect him, if only she could. Still, people sent their only child off to college all the time. Of course, it was painful. But they’d be fine. She’d make things fine between them. Claire would leave and make her own life, as all young people must, and she and Charlie would find a new way to be together. People did this all the time, too. They had emotional crises, too, rehashing the past, agonizing over what might have been. Eventually, they got it together and moved on. Which was exactly what Nora meant to do herself. It wasn’t as if she could actually change anything.
But that night, she lay sleepless trying to imagine how she would go on, what this new life with Charlie could be. The digital clock clicked off two o’clock. Then three. Four. Nora got up, shrugged on her robe and padded down the hallway to Claire’s room, where she stood in the doorway a long time and watched her sleep, Astro curled up at her feet. The room looked cavernous in the moonlight, stripped of its posters and decorations. The floor was unnaturally bare, the usual clutter having made its way into boxes and suitcases, the occasional shopping bag – all of which were lined up in the downstairs hallway, ready to be carried out to Dylan’s truck in the morning. Downstairs, she made herself a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the Newsweek Charlie had abandoned there.
She opened the magazine randomly to a photograph of the Philadelphia swim mom, in prison garb, almost unrecognizable from the beautiful blond woman who’d been arrested months before. Bravely or foolishly, she had spoken out about the impending war, comparing it to Vietnam, and said she did not regret having worked to end that war in the 1960s and ’70s. Someone had to do something then; someone had to do something now.
It was a sidebar to the major article about Iraq, which reported that seven out of ten Americans supported military action in Iraq; fifty-nine percent were ready to use ground troops. This despite the fact that even some Republicans warned that the President was rushing the country into war; countries who had supported the Gulf War were unwilling to provide staging areas for U.S. troops; and even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, it was likely that they lacked the range to be dangerous to American citizens. Not to mention the fact that the Iraqi people had done nothing to bring down the wrath of the United States upon them.
People saw what they wanted and needed to see. Nora knew that. She had been ignorant about Vietnam until Wayne Dugan forced her to think about what was happening there, until she heard the Marine speak at the demonstration in Dunn Meadow. Even then, she hadn’t wanted to think about it. But after her brother’s death, she had been drawn to the fringes of demonstrations, where she stood watching, listening. Waiting, she realized only later, for the moment when it would be clear what she should do.
Resolutely, she closed the Newsweek and threw it in the trash. She would not think about what a mess the world was in on this last morning with Claire or worry about sending her out into it. Near dawn, the birds began their agitated chatter in the tall pine outside the kitchen window. Nora sat, watching the meadow and forest beyond emerge, first in silhouette, then in full color. Upstairs, Claire’s alarm went off; moments later, Nora heard the sound of the shower.
She roused Charlie, then put the coffee on, and began to fix the blueberry waffles she’d promised. Soon there was the crunch of Dylan’s truck in the driveway. Claire burst into the kitchen, flushed with excitement, and met him at the back door, throwing her arms around him.
“I’m here to kidnap your daughter,” he said, with a grin.
When they’d finally gone – when Claire had picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the meadow and wrapped it in wet paper towels for her dorm room, thrown one last stick for Astro, run back to give her parents one last hug – Nora and Charlie went back to the kitchen and sat in silence, emptiness humming all around them. Even Astro looked sad, sniffing the air where Claire had been.
Nora was glad when Charlie got up to go out to the clinic. She sat awhile, imagining Dylan’s red truck on a map, heading south toward Indiana. She cried a little. She went upstairs to the computer Claire had left behind in favor of her new laptop and sent her an e-mail: I miss you already. Then pulled up Google and typed in the swim mom’s real name: Carole Matthias.
But it was her assumed name, Laura Ann Pearson, that popped up as the first entry: a brief biography, some background on the so-called crime she had committed in the 1970s, information about her life as Carole Matthias, and an account of her arrest, as well as what had happened to her since then.
The arrest had occurred in January, and she had pled guilty and accepted a plea bargain. Weeks later, though, she had withdrawn it, stating that she had agreed to it only because she had been convinced by her lawyer that the events of 9/11 made it impossible for an accused bomber to receive a fair trail. She told the judge that she had pleaded guilty in what she thought was in her own and her family’s best interest. But it wasn’t the truth and she realized she couldn’t live with the fact that she had lied.”
She added that she had not made the bomb, nor had she possessed or planted the bomb. It was under the concept of aiding and abetting that she pled guilty.
The judge offered to let her testify under oath about her role in the case, but she refused, stating that she wanted a trial. He denied her request, and sentenced her to serve ten-years-to-life, as opposed to the three-to-five year sentence she had agreed to in the plea – and the life she’d known as Laura Ann Pearson was over.
Her family and friends supported and continued to believe in her, and most media were in agreement that she’d never have been arrested in the first place if 9/11 hadn’t given the Bush administration a rationale for pursuing the radical right-wing agenda they had wanted to pursue all along. Those who spoke out about the hijacking of civil rights and the invasion of privacy were considered not only unpatriotic but potential “domestic terrorists,” which had given the FBI grounds to reopen cases from the sixties and seventies that had long been abandoned – and to fan the flames of fear generated by the attacks.
“Laura Ann Pearson, the wife, swim mom, painter, gourmet cook, aka Carol Matthias, the accused terrorist and former radical fugitive, has pleaded guilty to possessing bombs with intent to murder police officers in San Francisco,” one article read. “Her story represents two very different lives. To Pearson’s friends and champions, she is a symbol of passion and conviction. To many law enforcement officials and others, this woman – whomever she claims to be – committed serious crimes and owes an accounting.
“Which do you think she really is?”
Both, Nora knew.