On a shelf in Tom’s basement there was a box marked “Jane,” filled with the things she’d left behind the night of the bombing. Her birth certificate, her high school yearbooks, her college diploma. The leather ring binder she’d splurged on her freshman year, worn from years of use, neatly organized with notes from her last semester of classes – and extra packages of paper, narrow-ruled. Yellowed with age. A dozen or so battered, annotated paperbacks she had particularly loved, an odd assortment – everything from Pride and Prejudice to Black Like Me. The hardback copy of Little Women a favorite uncle had given her for Christmas when she was in the fourth grade, its thin pages worn as soft as cloth from reading and rereading it. The ratty, washed-out IU sweatshirt she’d bought when she was a freshman and had never been able to part with.
Photographs. Fraternity dances: Tom and herself, Bridget and Pete, arms wound around each other, grinning. Pictures of herself with Bridget mugging for the camera, time passing in the clothes they wore – wheat jeans and madras shirts to embroidered bell-bottom jeans and hippy blouses. One Bridget had taken at Bean Blossom: Tom standing behind Jane, his arms wrapped around her, Lake Lemon shimmering in the background, ringed by trees in autumn color. They leaned into the frame of the picture, sun-struck, smiling.
There were Bobby’s letters and the letter Daniel Pettus had sent to her when her student teaching was done, the brown, ruled paper it was written on crinkled at the edges. There were class pictures from every year she’d taught, the reports on ancient Egypt she’d meant to grade over Christmas break, still in the canvas bag she carried back and forth to school each day. The sight of the children’s handwriting, their voices on the page brought them back to her so vividly – and the sorrow she had felt at disappearing so suddenly and completely from their lives. They were grown now, well into their thirties. What had become of them?
She and Tom had kissed their way home that first night, hesitating only for a moment before going inside. “Jesus,” he said. “I feel like I did that day I went over to the dorm to see if you really wanted to go out with me.”
She smiled. “I did want to,” she said. “What I’m thinking about is that first time, at Pete’s. Remember that?”
He kissed her again, turned the key in the lock. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I remember.”
They made love, slept, finally, in each other’s arms – Maxine, curled up at the foot of the bed, having observed them intently through it all, her head cocked, as if to say, “What’s going on here, anyway?”
The next morning, Tom had brought the box up from the basement and set it before her. Opening it, taking out the objects one by one, Nora felt like an archaeologist of her own life. Each thing Tom had saved, an artifact that might have been lost forever. Each one a small, tangible piece of what her life once was – and might have been.
The sight of the children’s handwriting had brought back winter mornings in her classroom, the sense of anticipation she’d always felt as the yellow school buses pulled into the parking lot. The pure joy of the children entering the room, surrounding her like a flock of beautiful birds. She remembered in her body the utter confidence she had felt teaching, the knowledge that being with the children was the single thing in her whole life that was absolutely good and right – and she was struck with an overpowering sense of loss for what she had believed would be her life’s work. Washed with longing for that place and time, the sense of purpose and possibility she’d felt in her classroom, the lives of her students in her hands.
“You can teach again, if you want to,” Tom said, when she dissolved into tears trying to explain this. “You have a savings account, remember? And nearly thirty years of interest on whatever was in it. More than enough to take any classes you’d need to take to renew your license.”
She was shocked to realize the money was still there, taken aback by the possibility of resuming a teaching career after all these years – and cried harder.
“Jane,” Tom said. “Nora. Nora. You can do anything. Nothing. I don’t care. I’m just saying the money’s there for when you need it.”
“But I don’t know what I want to do. I can’t even imagine –”
“You don’t have to. You know you’ve got the money; we’ll go from there.”
We, Nora thought – and remembered how, to Tom, they had been “we” from the start.
“I’m coming,” Diane said, when Nora finally told her that she’d moved down to Tom’s house. “I mean, is it okay if I come? I’m going to Chicago to see Henry this weekend, how about if I come down afterward? Nora, we need to talk.”
When she got there late Sunday afternoon, she hugged Nora hard. Letting go, she held out her hand to Tom. “Listen,” she said. “I’m not here to try to drag her back to Michigan, in case that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t think that.”
But something changed in his face that made Nora think that, until that moment, he had. “Can I get you a beer?” he asked Diane. “A glass of wine?”
“A beer would be fabulous. First, though –” She took a small photo album from the depths of her bag and held it out to him. “You’ll want to fully admire Henry, the wonder-child.”
He laughed, paged through it obediently, Nora peering over his shoulder.
“Clearly a genius,” he pronounced.
“He’s perfect.” Nora smiled.
“Well,” Diane said. “I knew it was the right thing to drive down here and see you.” And had them laughing within minutes, telling about Mo’s encounter with her ex-husband, Bob.
“They instantly took against each other, no surprise, but I’m sitting there watching the two of them glower at each other, thinking, Hey, Bob, asshole, you’re the one who dropped in with no invitation, why don’t you just get the hell out of here, and it suddenly strikes me as hilarious that the two great loves of my life are Republicans. Not that Bob was exactly – oh, well. You know what I mean. I married him, for whatever that’s worth. Though I was pregnant,” she added, to Tom.
“Still. I do vaguely remember being in love with him. Or misplaced lust. Whatever.
“Mo’s coming around, though,” she went on. “God knows, I’ve been working on her night and day. Even she admits the Colin Powell thing was a debacle. And the Brits and their phony dossier? Totally absurd. I’ll tell you, though. Northern Michigan is full of ‘patriots.’ Every other car with a flag stuck on it somewhere and those idiotic bumper stickers.”
“They’re everywhere,” Tom said.
They walked to the square for dinner, Diane and Tom still talking about Iraq, Nora happy at the new sound their familiar voices mingling made.
“I just needed to see you with him,” Diane said to Nora over coffee in Tom’s kitchen after he’d gone to work the next morning. “I couldn’t think about you, I couldn’t think about anything until –” Her voice went wobbly. “I like him. Tom. You’re different with him. It’s like you’re standing in the sun. But what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know what to do. All I know is I can’t even think about walking away from him again, I don’t want to think about it. But I don’t know what that means. And I feel so horrible about –” Nora took a deep breath, blew it out. “Tell me about Charlie,” she said.
“There’s not much to tell,” Diane said. “He won’t talk about it, not even to Mo. He goes on through the days the way he always has, except you’re not there. He keeps Astro with him all the time, that’s the only thing different. It’s awful, you know? Not that I’m saying –”
“What? It’s not my fault? I should go back? It is my fault; I should go back. I have to, eventually. I know that. But –”
“It’s Claire I’m worried about,” Diane said. “That’s the other reason I came. She won’t talk to you, I have no idea what she and Charlie talk about, if they’ve talked about this at all, and both Mo and I are afraid she’ll come home for spring break and be shocked by the shape he’s in. Plus, somebody needs to see her, see how she is.
“Do you think she’d talk to me?” she went on. “I mean, what if I just call her? I’m her co-godmother, for Pete’s sake. What’s she going to do, hang up on me?”
“She might,” Nora said.
“Well, if she does, she does.”
“Go for it,” Nora said. “It can’t hurt to give it a try.”
Diane took out her cell phone, hit Claire’s number on speed dial.
“Hey, Claire,” she said, after a few moments. “It is. Well, I just knew you were probably thinking, why doesn’t somebody call me up and give me a full report on that baby! Oh, my gosh, Claire, he is so – amazing.” She described Henry, laughed. “Of course, it would be virtually impossible for any child to be cuter than you were, but I’ve got to say he’s right up there. I can’t wait for you to see him. Honey, how are you?”
She was quiet a while, listening. “Mmmm,” she said, occasionally. Or, “I know.”
Nora got up, poured another cup of coffee, straightened the newspaper Tom had left on the table.
“Listen, can I come see you?” Diane asked. “I probably should have said this right off, but I was just so glad to hear your voice and I – well, I’m here, in Bloomington. With your mom.” She glanced at Nora, raised an eyebrow hopefully.
Then she said, “It’s okay. I totally understand. I’ll come alone. Just tell me where.” She paused. “Right. I’m sure I can find it.”
Diane punched the “off” button and put the phone back in her bag. “We’re meeting in an hour. At the Student Union, in the Commons, wherever that is.”
“Oh, God,” Nora said. “That’s where I met Tom.”
“Well,” Diane said. “I sure as hell won’t tell her that. So, okay, let’s get dressed and walk ourselves into some kind of state of – okay, calm would be too much to ask. We’ll just walk. Then you can take me to the Commons and we’ll figure out a place to meet afterwards.
“How did she sound?” Nora asked.
Diane shrugged. “A little lost. Pissed. But –”
“I know,” Nora said. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
They set out walking soon afterwards, bundled up in their parkas. It was overcast and gray, the cars on Kirkwood Avenue filthy with the salt and slush kicked up from the street. The Petoskey stone Nora had picked up the morning she met Tom on the beach was still in her pocket. She’d forgotten to throw it back into the lake. She fingered it now, wondering what Lake Michigan looked like this morning. Blue, silver, green, gray. She thought about how in the coldest weather ice balls – some as big as snowmen – formed near the shore, bobbling in the water, how the beach looked marbled sometimes, tan and white with melting snow.
They’d walked through the campus gates by then. There was the old library, where she and Tom had studied sometimes that first year. The Student Union, Wylie Hall, where she had sat enthralled, listening to Professor Berkowitz lecture about The Canterbury Tales. Past Ballantine Hall, they took the path down through the woods that Nora used to walk to class from her dorm. No voices, no scales coming from the closed windows of the music building. The greenhouse windows at Jordan Hall were fogged over, showing only the occasional gargantuan palm leaf pressed against the glass. Students hurried past them, bent into the cold.
They made their way back to the Union twenty minutes before Claire would arrive. There was music playing on the jukebox in the Commons – something Nora didn’t recognize. Dim light seeped in through the narrow leaded windows, slanting wanly across the wooden tables.
“Where were you?” Diane asked. “When you met Tom?”
“Where the Burger King kitchen is now. They’ve changed everything. He and Pete went out that same revolving door over there just after I met him, though. I remember that. And Bridget and I being all whipped up into a frenzy because they’d just asked us to a party at the fraternity house the next night.”
“God, do you believe how fucking old we are?” Diane asked.
They arranged to meet at the Starbucks just across from the university gates when Diane was finished talking with Claire. Nora couldn’t just go sit, though. She walked a while longer, glad for the raw, wet wind that made her face sting. She wished she had thought to bring Tom’s iPod, which she’d borrowed other mornings when she walked. He had hundreds of old songs on it that played randomly. She never knew what would come up, what memories would come with it. If they were too painful, all she had to do was touch the button for a new song and the memories it brought, which – with luck – would be happier, or at least easier to bear.
Surely, everyone felt this way to some degree by the time they’d reached their fifties. Surely, everyone had memories they tried to avoid. But if you’d led a life in which the same memories were free to float up again and again, maybe the edges wore away, the worst parts receding over time. It seemed impossible to her now that she had been able to forget so much for so long. Would she have just died someday, all those painful memories still buried inside her, if Claire had made a different choice?
She thought of the guilt she’d felt at Claire’s age, insisting that her parents give her something they could not afford, how she couldn’t forgive her mother for the sacrifice she’d made so she could to college. For the small, struggling life she led that made such sacrifice necessary. She shivered, not only from the cold. What if Claire never forgave her letting her have what she wanted, when she had known full well all that might be lost because of it?
Knowing, too, what – who – she might find.
At Starbucks, she bought a large latte and held it in her hands for the warmth. A table opened up near the window and she sat down, rubbing a circle on the glass, hoping Claire might walk Diane to the gates and she might at least catch a glimpse of her. It was foolish to hope that the two of them would appear and walk, smiling, toward the café together; still, hope flared up and she could not quite extinguish it.
She breathed in the smell of coffee and cinnamon, held her gaze on the gates until Diane appeared, alone, and made her way across the street. She put her palm on the cold window, as if this would somehow focus her thoughts, then drew it back again and put both hands in her lap.
“I’m sorry,” Diane said, sinking into the chair beside her, unwinding the scarf from around her neck. “I didn’t say so, but I thought I could get her to come talk to you. I was sure of it. Shit. Nora, I’ve probably only made you feel worse.”
Nora shook her head.
“Because you couldn’t feel worse,” Diane said. “Believe me. I know.”
“Exactly why I’m glad you came, no matter what,” Nora said. “You’re the only one who has any idea what this is like. Tom doesn’t. He can’t.”
Diane leaned toward her, eyes brimming with tears. “The thing is, Nora – she’s going home; Dylan’s taking her this weekend.”
“For spring break? I knew they had it early, but –”
“No. To stay. Well, for now.”
“Stay?” Nora asked. “But she can’t do that. Her classes –”
“She dropped out the first week, moved out of the dorm,” Diane said. “She’s been staying with Dylan. He came, after we’d been talking for a while – he was probably there all along and I just didn’t see him. He told me she’d already made up her mind to do it before she got to Cincinnati. Poor kid, he looked beat. He tried to talk her out of it, he said –”
“And Charlie’s letting her do this? Goddamn him,” Nora said. “He’s the one who insisted she had to come here in the first place. It was so perfect for her. No other place would do. Now he’s just going to let her throw it all away.
“What’s wrong with him?” she went on. “It didn’t have to be like this. If he’d helped me when I said I had to tell her – but no. He refused to deal with it at all. Like it would just go away if we –”
She stopped when she realized that the women at the table next to theirs had stopped talking and were staring at her.
“He doesn’t know,” Diane said, quietly.
“Oh.” Nora put her hands to her face. “Oh, God. What should I do?”
“I don’t think there’s anything you can do. She’s determined to go. You could come back with me.” She looked at Nora. “But unless you think you and Charlie might get back together, there’s a good chance it would make things worse. I don’t know, maybe it would be a good thing for just the two of them to be together right now. Dylan will stay through spring break; he’s coming again for the summer; and Claire’s planning to come back to Bloomington with him in the fall. By then –”
“What?” Nora asked. “By then, what?”
“You’ll have a better idea of what your life is going to be – and maybe Claire will be more willing to consider where she can fit into it.”
“Maybe not, though.” Nora said.
Diane sighed. “Come on. You knew this part wasn’t going to be easy.”
Tears streamed down Nora’s face and she blotted them with a napkin. “I know,” she said. “I know. But it never once occurred to me when I decided to come back to Bloomington with Tom that Claire wouldn’t be here. Near me.”