SUBJECT Re: Then
DATE SENT Mon, Dec 3, 2002 8:12 AM
I hate to think how many times I’ve run it all through my head, thinking, what if I hadn’t gone? What if I’d come back that night, like I should have? The only thing I know for sure is that if I’d been there and been the one who woke up and heard Bridget leave, I’d have let her go. I was sick to death of her by then – all the fucking melodrama about her love life, her political tantrums, her moral outrage about every little thing. And, okay, since we’re coming clean here, I was pissed off at you, too. I just didn’t get the thing with my mom; that was part of it. But mainly I was pissed off because you kept taking Bridget in. All the time she lived with us, right from the start, I wanted her to leave.
But if I’d said, “Okay, I’m done. It’s me or Bridget,” I wasn’t sure which one of us you’d choose.
I was glad every time she went away. And, yeah, we were friends in high school. I liked her family; they were always good to me. But I swear to God that, by then, if Bridget had gone and blown herself up that night all alone, I wouldn’t have been that sorry.
Even after all this time, there’s no way I can explain how I felt Christmas morning when I got home and you were gone. You’d made your choice, I thought – and without even leaving me a note to tell me why. I didn’t know about the bombing until a couple of hours later, when the guy next door stopped by with some cookies his wife had made and mentioned it, and the fact that a body had been found. I called the police. What else could I do? I told them that Bridget had been here, that you were missing. For three days, until what was left of Bridget was finally identified, I was afraid you were the one who died – and all I could think was that if it wasn’t you and if I ever saw Bridget again I’d kill her myself. I think I would have, too. But then I’d think, if it wasn’t you, if you did make it out alive, then you’d gone off with Cameron. Which, it turned out, was true.
You asked how could I not have known that you needed me to stay that Christmas Eve. I did know. You were pissed at me for asking you to go; I was pissed at you for being stubborn about not going with me. Then Bridget came and the whole thing shifted and I felt like you’d chosen to spend Christmas with her instead of me. So, stupidly, I left, mad, and drank too much at the fucking country club and had to stay the night. I blame myself for that.
But here’s what I want to know. After you got away from Cameron, why didn’t you come back? Didn’t you know I’d want you back, no matter what?
FROM JBMI65@aol.com
SUBJECT Re: Then
DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 1:17 AM
I knew. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t want to come back. When I think about it now, it seems totally obvious that I should have called you the second I got away from Cam. You’d have come for me, we’d have figured out what to do together. But then, so many things seem obvious to me now.
This is such a strange age, isn’t it? The way, suddenly, you have this long view of your life – like the map of a journey that had no map when were traveling it. You see how clearly one road led to the next and the next. You see what mattered. You, Bridget, Claire. That was it for me – and my mother-in-law, Jo, who was the real reason I ended up where I am. If I hadn’t encountered her by chance, I don’t know how much longer I could have just wandered, resisting the temptation to come back to you, regardless of the consequences. Because, like you said, I always knew where you would be.
Funny. Now it’s news 24/7. You can find out anything, anywhere, any time. Then, we didn’t know, couldn’t safely try to find out what had actually happened after the bomb exploded. I remember that afterwards Cam had the radio on in the car, listening for news. There was one report in the morning: the damage done, an unidentified body found, not even any speculation about who might be responsible. But the station faded away as we got farther and farther from Bloomington, and was completely gone by the time we crossed over into Illinois. Then, within days, the bombing in Vietnam stopped, there was serious talk of the war really, finally ending – and what Bridget did turned out to be such a small story, after all. Buried in the back pages of the newspapers. She would have hated that.
I was scared to death the whole time I was with him. He convinced me the FBI was looking for me. He made me handle guns and documents so my fingerprints would be on them. The thing is, though, getting caught, going to prison, wasn’t what scared me the most – some part of me would have been thankful for a clear punishment for what I’d done. What terrified me was coming back to the mess I’d made of my life. I couldn’t even bear to think about it. I knew you loved me, I knew you’d want me to come back, but I couldn’t see how I could let you forgive me when I knew I could never forgive myself.
For the longest time after I got away from Cam, I just drifted. Northern California, Oregon, Idaho. I waited tables in crappy little nowhere places. I’d save up a couple hundred dollars, enough to move on. I had to keep moving, I thought. When I thought about all I’d done, all I’d lost, I’d make myself stop – and eventually I did stop. Altogether. Which amazes me now. I mean, all those years. How could I have just . . . forgotten? After Claire decided on Bloomington, I started having dreams about the night of the bombing, but I didn’t actually think about it – or what happened afterwards. I didn’t dare.
I still wonder if Bridget meant for me to follow her – and, if she did, whether it was to force me, finally, to act on what I said I believed or to make me save her from herself. She never told me what she planned to do or asked me to help – though, of course, she’d used me, used both of us, appearing like she did, knowing we’d be implicated once the bomb had gone off. I was angry and upset with you about Evansville. She knew that. She knew I was distraught about the bombing in Vietnam. Maybe she purposely reeled me in, playing on my guilt for doing nothing about the war, on my worst fears about us – that, ultimately, you’d choose the life your parents raised you to lead. And where would that leave me?
Even so, when I left the house that night, it wasn’t a political act, it so wasn’t about being angry at you. I followed Bridget to try to stop her from whatever she was setting out to do. When I couldn’t stop her, I stayed with her because, stupidly, I believed I could somehow keep her safe.
There’s so much I’ve forgotten. But this part I remember perfectly. I’ve dreamed it over and over these past months. The vast emptiness of early, early morning. Crisp, cold. The sky black, dotted with stars. Bridget ahead of me, walking at a quick pace, appearing, disappearing under the streetlights. When I realized she was heading for the ROTC building, I took off running after her.
Here’s where the dream I have differs from what actually happened: I go into the building with her. I’m there when the bomb goes off prematurely. I hear glass shattering and see the windows blow out. I see the Bridget I first knew wheeling backward, on fire, her beautiful, long red hair streaming.
The thing is, Tom, I’ve dreamed that dream so many times now, I half-believe I actually was in the building with her. But if I had been there, I’d be dead, too. In fact, we stood outside the building, arguing, until she took a package from the duffel then thrust the bag into my hands just before climbing into the window that had been left open for her.
As for what happened after that, there was a terrible blast. Fire. Cam appeared, as if out of nowhere. I remember that – and that he was rough with me. Maybe I was screaming. I probably was. Like I said before, I remember being in a car with him, but not how I got there. I remember begging him to let me out, let me go. He was furious, raging about Bridget. He’d told her not to contact me – and hadn’t that been what killed her, after all? Letting me distract her from her purpose?
I think I would have come back if he’d let me go that first night. But by the time I did get away, it seemed too late. But to be totally honest, there was this, too: I was so tired. There was something easy about accepting, finally, what that little voice inside me had been saying all along. You don’t deserve Tom, you never did. You’re not capable of being the person you wanted to be. Look at what I’d demanded of my parents, I told myself – then willfully, selfishly broken their hearts. I’d failed Bridget, I’d failed my students, who loved and depended on me. Worst of all I’d failed you and ruined all we might have had together.
I wonder now where such shame comes from, the instinct to turn to shame first in trying to make any sense at all of what has happened to you. All I know is that my whole early life was shaped by it. “Is there anything that satisfies you, Jane?” my mother would ask, when I behaved badly or was moody and sullen. “Is there anything that makes you happy?”
There wasn’t, really. I wanted. She didn’t understand that. She couldn’t see that I just wasn’t a happy person by nature. Her deep desire for my happiness, her belief that I could be happy if only I tried, oppressed me. It enraged me, which I knew was ridiculous, even then. What mother wouldn’t want her daughter to be happy? What kind of daughter hoarded any happiness that did come her way?
But then.
That first day with Cam, I found a set of documents in Bridget’s duffel. Birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license. I was smart enough to put them in a secret place, for when I mustered up the courage to get away from Cam. Nora White. I used to think about her: born the same year I was born, in St. Louis. Who was she? Most fake identity papers used names of dead people. I knew that and wondered, how did she die? But eventually she became me: a woman who’d lost everything through her own stupidity, a woman with no life, nowhere to go.
It surprised me, in a way: it’s not as difficult to change your identity as you might think. Women do it all the time, even now – changing their last names when they marry. Really, it would be almost as hard to track down a high school classmate who’d moved away and married – maybe several times – as it would have been to find me. By the time I married Charlie and changed my name a second time, it seemed to me that Jane really had died on that Christmas morning.
So much of what happened between then and the summer I landed in Monarch is a blank. Nobody ever questioned the story I told about my parents, dead in a car accident. How I struck out on my own afterwards. Even I didn’t question it after a while. I never thought about the past, lived only in the now.
But, really, doesn’t that happen to everyone to some degree?
I mean, life happens. Not that so much of it isn’t lovely: waves sparkling on the lake in the early morning, the smell of pies baking in your own kitchen, moths batting against the screens on summer nights. A child growing right before your eyes. Sometimes I think I could stack all of Claire’s school pictures top to bottom, kindergarten to twelfth grade, flip them like an animator to watch her grow, and the second it would take to do it would seem as long – or as short – as the years themselves took. Where do they go? Old people always say that. But it’s true.
But here’s what I’m writing to you about, really: remember, I said in the first e-mail I sent you that I told Charlie about Bobby, that it didn’t go well? What started it was, he’s been upset with me because he thinks I’ve become obsessed with Iraq. What does it have to do with us? We had a nasty little exchange about it Thanksgiving night, which surprised and upset Claire. I was nasty – after Charlie asked, didn’t I think it was a good thing that the inspectors were there?
Well, it doesn’t matter what the argument was about. Just that afterwards I felt ashamed of myself for hurting Charlie – and not for the first time in the past months. We’ve been – not okay, really, ever since Claire decided to go to IU. Worse since she left. And it’s been mostly my fault. So after Claire had gone to bed, I went downstairs and apologized – and told him about Bobby. That was three days ago, and he’s barely said a word to me since. I’m scared, Tom – I don’t know how long I can keep on this way.
FROM JBMI65@aol.com
SUBJECT PS
DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 7:33 AM
That day in Bloomington, you said you had a life. That it was good. I’m glad for that. What is it like? Tell me your greatest pleasures.
SUBJECT Re: PS
DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 7:33 AM
It’s pretty simple, really. The law practice – mostly civil rights and kids who get themselves in trouble somehow. I like it: license to fight. Though it’s depressing sometimes, how fucked up things are.
Anyway. Work. The gym right after that, then I usually eat out somewhere. Evenings, I read – or watch a movie or sports on TV, depending the season. Tuesday is pool night. Weekends I’m outside whenever I can be. I ski in the winter; summers I go fishing way up in Canada. I’ve got a house on Grant Street, just off Kirkwood Avenue, a great mutt, Maxine.
Pleasures (shallow): ’99 Corvette (red), ’97 Ford truck (black), ’67 GTO (maroon, mint condition), ’91 Harley Sturgis (black). Dad’s old aluminum fishing boat. Huge garage, mother of all garages. Probably, this won’t surprise you.
Like you said, life happens. Mostly, I’m happy.
Those first couple of years without you were tough ones, though. I’d go over to the Sig house on football Saturdays – you know, the old-fart lunch they always have. A lot of old guys with comb-overs, drunk at noon, talking about how great things were when they were in college. I’d go to remind myself of what I didn’t want to be.
Sunday evenings, I’d decide what I was going to do every night after work. I’d make a list, stick it on the refrigerator and fucking do every single thing on it – even when what I really wanted to do was hole up and feel sorry for myself. I said I was going to do that stuff, so I did. I learned how to keep you in a certain place in my mind. I was pretty good at it, too, until Pete saw you that day.
I went over to the house the Saturday after I saw you in October. Same scene, only now the old guys with comb-overs running the wasn’t-it-great-then trip are our age. There was nobody there I knew, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to see anyone. Just hang out, see what it felt like to be there. I wandered around. Checked out our composite pictures – down in the basement with the rest of the dinosaurs. Pete and I used to think that was hilarious. Like we’d never end up there ourselves. But there we were, so clean-cut, faking it in our suits and ties.
Really, the place hasn’t changed much at all. The dining room still smells like bad cooking mixed with sweat and beer. It’s still a pit upstairs. Remember the big clothes cupboard you hid in, holding the Bloody Marys, that night the fraternity police came through? It’s still in my old room on the third floor. I got a kick out of remembering how we used to sneak around upstairs. You’d have thought it was a federal offense. Shit. Now kids can do anything they want. Where’s the fun in that?
Yeah, I know. I sound like those old guys, after all.
Remember Pete when he came back that last time, how he was such a sanctimonious shit about the fact that I was in law school, you were teaching – we had plans for our lives. He was all about “Be Here Now.”
Who’d have thought he’d turn out to be right? Trouble is, though, since I saw you, Now and Then feel like exactly the same thing to me.
FROM JBMI65@aol.com
SUBJECT Re: PS
DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 8:37 AM
I know. Me, too.