Seventh Wonder (19 page)

* * *

She hadn’t seen him since just shy of six this morning, when she’d left to freshen up and change clothes before breakfast with her travel companions. Now they were out on a hike, enjoying their last day before reality could hit them full force, a rude awakening to the un-vacation-like parts of this life. Meg had slipped away quietly, eluding their questions about how she planned to spend her last day.

“I’m back,” she called out as she pushed John’s front door open. The shower was on; likely he couldn’t hear her. She was a half hour earlier than she’d said she would be, after all.

She took the ewer of water from the fridge and poured herself a glass, then ambled over to the table. It was clear what John had been up to after she left: the marred oak surface was covered with slides. She selected one at random and held it up to the light of the window: a thickset snake, coiled in the grass.

She continued sifting through until her fingers brushed a sheet of paper that had been obscured beneath the slides. The circular emblem at the corner caught her eye, and she lifted the sheet, letting the slides scatter.

The letter was typewritten and had an official feel to it, not least because of the seal with the bald eagle emblazoned at the top. There were numbers in boxes, dates stamped crookedly on various lines, and an illegible signature was scribbled at the bottom. For reasons she couldn’t pinpoint, without even reading it, Meg could feel the prodrome of a dizzy spell upon her like an aura.

At the top was printed THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. John’s home address was handwritten beneath:

John E. Stovall

45 Abby Marle East

Ridgewood, CA 96140

And below that: “You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States, and to report at ASSEMBLY ROOM - 14TH FLOOR, FEDERAL BLDG, 50 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, SAN FRANCISCO, CA
on JUNE 19, 1969 at 7 A.M.”

The letter slipped from her fingers and wafted to the ground.

* * *

John was still in shock. He floated through the motions of bathing without thinking: soaping his chest, shampooing his hair, rinsing off the suds in the gushing clear water. He’d turned it cold in hopes it would wake him from the nightmare he was having, but so far all he had to show for the gelid temperature was blue fingers and bluer toes.

Usually he could sense when Meg was there, but this time she took him by surprise. Understandable, perhaps, given his state of bewilderment. She was standing by the large picture window at the back of the room when he walked out of the bathroom, a towel draped low about his hips.

She turned slowly to face him, but there was no trace of a smile on her face as there had been every other time. She knew: he could sense it immediately, all the way to the depths of his bones.

He looked behind him, saw the letter face down on the floor, feet away from the table. He closed his eyes and inhaled a cleansing breath before once more meeting her eyes. She was watching him, appearing utterly broken. Waiting for him to speak.

“I went for the physical exam before I came here.” His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn’t used it in days. “Honestly, I went and then didn’t worry about it again - I’ve hardly thought of it at all these past few weeks.” He swallowed. “I guess... I assumed I was too old, that they wouldn’t be interested in me. There are so many younger, able-bodied men out there.”

He sunk into a chair, covered his face with his hands. The weight of his own despair pressed him into the ground.

“How long have you known?” Meg asked softly.

“The letter came this morning. I knew what it was the split second I saw that goddamn seal on the envelope. It had to be rerouted from my home address, which is why it’s late in getting here - it’s postmarked the third. That’s why I only have a week until I have to report.”

A clock on the fireplace mantle ticked off the seconds as they remained apart, each imprisoned, paralyzed in their own cage of grief.

Meg broke free of hers first. She tripped, fell into his arms more so than she ran, her body wracked with the sobs that wreck souls. John folded her tightly against him and kissed away each of her tears, even as his own threatened to fall.

* * *

“I’m not afraid, you know.”

Hours later: they’d been lying still in the fading light, arms and legs intertwined, their thoughts speeding along on separate but parallel tracks. John’s statement roused Meg from the very depths of her tormented reflections.

“I don’t want you to think I’m upset because I’m afraid to fight for my country,” he continued. “I have every bit as much responsibility to it as the 19 and 20 year olds of the world. I may have my reservations about what’s happening over there, but I would never think of refusing to step up.”

Meg nodded. Quietly: “I know.” She’d never even considered that his reaction might stem from fear, because to her, he was fearless.

She sighed, a great, shuddering sigh. “What will we do?”

“You and I?”

She nodded, and he hugged her closer.

“That part isn’t entirely up to me.”

“What if it was?” she asked.

He inhaled sharply, crushing his face against her neck; his body shook once. “Meg, God. Can there be anything harder than this?”

She blinked into the darkness, wishing she knew the answer.

* * *

Their last night was spent knotted in the sheets, talking and not talking, making love, never sleeping. Meg slipped out of bed just before sunrise to pack, promising to come back as soon as possible. Leaving him at the door was like a drill, practice for the real goodbye that would take place all too soon. Once outside, it took her a moment of gripping her knees, forcing herself to breathe in and breathe out, to dispel her nausea and regain the ability to keep moving forward.

Back at the cabin she’d never considered hers as much as she had John’s cottage, she stuffed shirts and socks and underwear in her bag with reckless abandon. She’d never performed any task so efficiently in her life. Faye was asleep with Don in the bed beside her. She opened her eyes before Meg left but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to: her hazel irises bespoke the pity she felt. It was more than Meg could bear, and she quickly looked away.

Rick was standing on the front porch of the cabin next door when she left, nursing a coffee in the bleary light of morning. Meg raised her hand in a stuttering wave, and he lifted his chin in response. She was halfway down the steps when he spoke her name.

“We’re heading out at eight, OK?” he said softly.

She nodded. Something about the way he said it led her to believe he understood more than he let on. Everyone else was leaving a simple destination; she was the only one leaving behind a piece of herself.

John was standing in his kitchen, drying the inside of a ceramic mug when she knocked and let herself in. He wasted no time in discarding the cup and wrapping her up in his arms. As he kissed her hair, he vowed to keep holding her until he was forced to let go.

They walked to the rim. Outside the door, John stooped and gestured for Meg to climb onto his back. She giggled as she clambered on and he slowly stood. His height lent her a new perspective of the world; she felt like a giant, lumbering amid the trees, reaching out to touch the leaves and pine needles as they passed.

The canyon was every bit as majestic this morning as it had been the first time she laid eyes on it - perhaps even more so. John sat against a tree, and Meg sat between his spread legs, her back pressed against his chest. He surrounded her with his arms as they gazed out at the jagged edges of a wilderness that stretched into infinity. This was how they spent their final hour: rocking gently back and forth, beholding a beauty too vast to consider all at once. Teetering dangerously close to the edge of a precipice neither would acknowledge.

At quarter of eight, the panic set in. They were suspended in a cloud that chose this moment to break and spill rain. Time was passing her by, spinning her faster and faster like a bobbin on a sewing machine, until she was no longer certain of which way was north.

“I’ll write to you,” John promised, nearly crushing her with the strength of his grip. “I’ll call if I can.”

Meg could only nod as she dug in her trusty shoulder bag for a pen and paper and wrote down her parents’ address and phone number. She wanted so badly to cry, knowing this would help her to feel better at least in some small way, but no tears came. Instead, she poured every last ounce of her energy into the hope that whatever this was that she felt, it wouldn’t fade the moment they were apart.

At five of eight, she stood up to leave. Her feet were heavy as two slabs of steel. John kissed her tenderly, rubbed his thumbs over her cheeks beneath her eyes. For a moment he stood back and allowed her to take her first step away from him, but then they turned to each other at once, unprepared for the finality of it. He kissed her deeply and without restraint as he fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket and pressed it into her palm.

There were words they could have said but didn’t, perhaps because actually expressing them struck both as needless. They felt them acutely enough, even in the absence of the spoken word.

Rick’s Monte Carlo and Don’s Fairlane were idling in the drive outside the lodge when Meg reached the road. They were all there, waiting for her. Alice was in the front passenger seat of Rick’s car, the same seat Meg had occupied for the trip down. She was more than happy to surrender it. Paul slid over and allowed Meg to climb into the backseat next to him instead. She was thankful to him for averting his eyes and granting her the privacy she needed so deeply.

The car lurched forward, churning up sluggish billows of dust in its wake. When they turned, Meg glanced over her shoulder through the back windshield just in time to catch a glimpse of John, standing silently amongst the trees, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Watching her go. She kept her eyes on him as they pulled away, until finally he turned and walked ever so slowly back into the trees, a vanishing specter.

Would she ever see him again?

Suddenly she remembered the scrap of paper folded in her hand, and she gingerly opened it up. On it, a handwritten passage taken from William Wordsworth:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind...

Finally, the tears came.

Chapter 10

Santa Monica, California

October 1969

Four months had elapsed since she’d seen his face. Eighteen weeks. One hundred and twenty-six days. The pain had dulled but not vanished. It was buried deep inside of her, and it chose seemingly arbitrary moments to prod at her and remind her of its anguished existence. When her father played Coltrane in the living room before dinner, for instance, or when Lucille Ingram, the elderly next door neighbor, brought over a blackberry cobbler she’d baked just that morning.

Now that Meg was home, no longer shielded from the realities of the world as she had been while on vacation, news of the war in Vietnam was virtually inescapable. If it wasn’t the daily fatality report on the evening news, it was the activists picketing outside the recruitment office or vivid photos of soldiers slogging through mangrove swamps splashed across the pages of every magazine at the supermarket. One rainy afternoon, Meg listened attentively as Louise Loew, a longtime friend of her mother’s, told of her nineteen-year-old nephew being conscripted and promptly deployed. “My brother tells me he’s already been through three different staff sergeants,” she’d said rather flippantly as she placed her teacup on the sideboard. “Evidently they keep getting killed.” The two women had clucked over the tragedy of it all before swiftly moving on to the pamphlet campaign they were organizing to educate women about the no-fault divorce law Governor Reagan had signed the month before.

She had received two letters from John in the intervening four months, both of which were profusely apologetic for not having time to write with any greater frequency. The first was on a single sheet of crinkled paper, obviously written over the course of several days (some in black ink and some in blue), which recounted the events of his induction into the Army and his transport by bus to Fort Irwin for basic training. The second was posted three weeks prior, and it was this one Meg kept with her at all times, folded in thirds and tucked between the pages of whatever book she happened to be reading.

9 September 1969

Dearest Meg,

I can’t apologize enough for the rarity of my letters, nor can I tell you how many I’ve started but run out of time to finish. It does my heart good, writing to you - even if I can never be sure whether you’ll read the words I’ve committed to paper.

I finished basic training on 24th August and launched directly into AIT, which is slated to last another 8 weeks. This part hasn’t been so horrible. I can’t deny it’s been physically taxing, but at night I have a bed to sleep in, and we get three square meals a day. Knowing what’s in store for all of us, I think we’ll take what we can get, for as long as we can get it.

Still, there are things I can’t help wishing for. What I wouldn’t give to hear your voice again, for instance. I long for you with everything I have. Scarcely a moment has passed when I haven’t thought of you or wished for even half a second to imagine myself beside you. Every single night I dream of you and the canyon. Your laughter, your smile, the sound of your voice when you read aloud.

It is imperative to me that you understand how much I value the relationship we’ve shared. I will cherish it and you more deeply than I’ll ever be able to express as I brave the trials of the coming years.

You already know that I, not unlike others, have survived some misfortunes in my life. These, of course, are not to be compared with the woes of certain others, including the Vietnamese for whom we fight, but they have brought me my own share of grief. Marrying young, bearing the uncertainties of youthful love, surviving a wife who didn’t deserve to die so young. Not to mention suffering the rigors of self-evaluation, applying myself to a drastic change in life goals and career... And finally, and perhaps most terrifying, finding that even through all of that, my heart is still capable of holding a love I’d thought long dead.