The Longest Night (11 page)

I
ndian summer stuck around Idaho Falls for a few more weeks. Paul feared they were all getting just a little too comfortable, forgetting that winter had a debt to extract.

Still, he was grateful for the reprieve. He was worried about Nat and the girls, housebound during a harsh winter when they were unaccustomed to cold in the first place. Nat had spent every year of her life in San Diego, with the exception of their one winter in Virginia while Paul was in reactor school. Even there, they'd had only a few dustings of snow that usually melted before Paul scraped off the car.

Idaho was another story. The weather finally did change, and it happened in the span of one late October day. Hard flecks of snow blew out in front of a rolling wind, leaving wet spatters on the windows. The sky settled into a low steel gray. It was as if they lived in an entirely different place from the gentle, honey-gold one they'd enjoyed the day before.

Nat hadn't brought up the car again since their argument, so Paul didn't, either. He was relieved that she let it go. Even mentioning the car might bring back the tight, queasy feel of the argument, and he didn't want to let that mood back into their house. Besides, once snow began to fall she wouldn't want to drive. She'd said that herself—that driving in snow would make her nervous.

Meanwhile, the cold camped out for the long haul. Temperatures fell into the forties, the thirties, and then the teens for a couple of blistering, miserable weeks. So
this
was the Idaho winter people had warned them about. The days felt like a narrow tunnel of time, all dim early morning and shadowy evening with a handful of icy, rayless hours in between. They wore coats that went down to their ankles and shuffled to and from the house when they had to. Snow gathered on the front lawn and never melted. Paul's bus ride to work was downright freezing. The men hunched into their jackets and tucked their heads, shouldering against the thin bus windows, their knuckles bluing as they gripped the lapels of their coats.

As for Nat and the girls, they were good sports. Nat filled vases around the house with bright, gaudy silk flowers. She and the girls made construction paper hearts and stars in pink and yellow and red. The living room began, in fact, to look like a preschool classroom. Dried glue formed hard spots on the carpet; scissor clippings drifted across the floor. Paul never knew quite what he'd find when he came home from work. He didn't mind, so long as everyone was happy, but then one afternoon he walked up the short shoveled walk, arches of snow on either side, and stepped through the front door to find the girls alone in the living room, banging on pots and pans, and Nat in bed, fully clothed with the lights off at the back of the house. She wasn't sick; she just felt a little blah, she said.

The next day after work, he stopped by the electronics shop downtown and came home with a seventeen-inch black-and-white RCA Victor television. It was built into a fat cabinet with splayed wooden legs and it looked like a pig on ice skates. He had never cared for TV—its jarring flashes of gray light, the canned laughter like a hiccup in your brain—but when Nat saw him elbow through the door with it, she grabbed his face and kissed him. He'd feared she might say it was too small, or wish aloud that he'd splurged for color, but she seemed truly happy with the thing, and for the rest of the winter it was a staple of her and the girls' days. Now when Paul came home from work Sam and Liddie were lying on the living room floor, nicely dressed and watching
Lassie,
while Nat made chicken à la king a few feet away in the kitchen.

When the snow finally began to melt and tips of green peeked out from the mud, Paul gathered his courage enough to bring up the car again. The TV purchase had made him slightly addicted to keeping Nat happy. So he waited until she'd had a very good day with the girls—a nice conversation with another mom buying groceries at the PX, a dinner that turned out particularly well—and when they settled into bed he asked Nat if she'd like to start taking the Fireflite one day a week. She'd said yes, she would like that very much, and kissed him. He was so pleased with her response that he whispered in her ear, asking if she remembered that night out in the backyard, last June, with the crickets singing all around them. She smiled when he said this, looked at him for a long moment, and slid her nightgown off over her head. He was surprised by how pale she'd grown indoors all winter. It was the same start he'd felt catching his own reflection sidelong in a mirror after basic, his beard shaved off for the first time in years: as if something were missing, or more vulnerable. She'd been pared to a sort of quiet mystery, and he was intrigued by the change.

So on Fridays when he worked the day or mid shift, Nat kept the car and he got a ride to the bus stop with Franks. The arrangement worked out fine; in fact, Paul felt embarrassed by his earlier reluctance. Though he didn't love the extra proximity to his shift leader's corny jokes and halitosis, he began to find Franks slightly endearing. As soon as Paul climbed into the car Franks would say, “This is from Brownie,” cradling over a muffin or square of coffee cake that still steamed as Paul unwrapped it. Paul always ate one half and saved the other for Webb, who, as a bachelor, had no one to bake for him.

As for the reactor, it continued to trouble the operators, resisting their best fixes and efforts. No new core arrived. From time to time the men would ask one another when it was coming, had they heard anything, had any of the engineers been poking around? But there was no word, and when they questioned Sergeant Richards he just said, “I'm as eager as anybody else, boys.” The rods still stuck, the reactor still ran hot, but they always managed to pull things together at the last minute. “Good old army ingenuity,” said Franks, who was developing a twitch in his right eye.

Soon enough, the tour would be over and Paul could get out of there. He was starting to fantasize about it, the relief of driving away from the Idaho line in any direction, knowing he'd never have to work another nerve-racking shift on the CR-1, never have to tell a prodding Nat that things were fine and she shouldn't worry. He realized that he was lying to her daily. It was in her own best interest but he still felt guilty. He could feel the lies stacking up against him like a wall built one pebble at a time, and it made him tense.

Just wait it out,
he told himself.
Just hang in there and be patient
. In the meantime, work was work, and if he could get through those hours there was the brief miracle of freedom on the other side. So Paul worked the day shift, the mid shift, the night shift, coming home while the girls were eating breakfast, or sometimes just before dinner, or sometimes in the middle of the night when the entire house was asleep and he cozied up to Nat in their drafty back bedroom, hearing her murmur hello and drape her warm arm over him, thinking it nearly amazing that he could be out in that dark, nothingness world and return to this little pointy-roofed house where all the life that mattered to him lay.

W
hen spring finally came, the world was feverish with it. Birds called well before light, shaking the big tree in the front yard. Nat let the girls puddle-stomp up the sidewalk until gray water ran down their shins. She opened the windows even before it was quite warm enough, and made a canned peach cobbler as if it were already high summer.

Paul's birthday came around on June 4 and he said he didn't want a fuss, but that was just too bad: Nat loved birthdays. She spent the night before trying to dream up some gift she and the girls could give, but because Paul never asked for anything she finally decided to just surprise him. She and the girls would bring him balloons and pick him up from work, sparing him the bus ride home.

They'd never showed up unannounced before; she hoped he would like it and not be ruffled by their sudden appearance. Well, it was too late now. She pulled up at the chain-link fence outside the CR-1 and was greeted by the day security man, who passed her into the gravel lot with instructions to stay by her car. On her lap fluttered a sheet of paper with the directions she'd jotted down, dictated by Brownie Franks, whom she had phoned that morning and finally pried the necessary information out of after listening to a recap of a recent book Brownie had read and begging out of an invitation to a Tupperware party.

In the backseat, each girl clutched a balloon: Liddie's red, Sam's yellow. Sam's muffled voice pressed through hers. “Is he coming? Do you see him?”

“Not yet,” said Nat, craning. She felt nearly as excited as her daughters. The girls squeezed their faces against the thin-stretched rubber, stifling giggles. When Nat glanced back she saw Liddie's nose spread wide, her face tinted red as if she'd blown a giant bubble of gum that was about to burst.

“How old is Daddy going to be again?” Sam asked.

“Twenty-six,” said Nat. She glanced at her watch: It was ten to four. The day shift was almost over. When the door of the building opened she nearly jumped with excitement, but it wasn't Paul; it was Master Sergeant Richards.

Of course he saw them right away, the only other car in the parking lot and with balloons in the back, no less. He loped toward them, hands in his pockets, dimpled smile. Nat slid from the car with a little wave, clicking the door shut. She did not really wish to talk to him, and had mostly avoided doing so (they passed each other in the neighborhood on occasion, and they'd had to make brief small talk at a work party one winter evening, though Paul circled her around the room and kept her mostly out of Richards's orbit). Still, he was Paul's boss and, as she had no real choice in the matter, it was important to be polite. She prayed he wouldn't bring up their odd encounter a year before, that bizarre argument she'd witnessed in his driveway. Even thinking about it made her nervous: Richards clutching his face, shouting “What in the hell, woman?” Jeannie's sneer:
“I see you've found a new favorite dress, Nat.”

Richards reached Nat and stood, smiling. The car tilted and bumped as the girls rollicked in the backseat. Nat pretended not to notice. “Hello, Master Sergeant,” she said.

“So, what's this? Have I won a new car?” Richards asked.

“It's Paul's birthday,” Nat said. “We thought we'd surprise him at work.” She loved the day each week that she got the Fireflite, even though all she usually did was the grocery shopping.

“Collier's birthday!” said Richards. “I don't suppose he'd have told us. What do you have in there, a caged tiger?”

“It's us!” said Sam, faintly, from inside.

“Well, hello.” Richards bent and waved in the window. Sam looked at her mother hopefully but Nat made no move to open the door. Still, Richards's joking manner with the girls made her feel a bit more at ease.

“He's thirty-six!”
shouted Sam, nearly splatting against the car window. “I have a balloon for him!”

“Me, too,” said Liddie.

“He's not thirty-six,” said Nat. Then she thought maybe this sounded too emphatic, as if thirty-six were impossibly old when Richards must be somewhere not far from that, so she repeated, “I mean, he's just not,” which, it turned out, neither helped nor clarified.

Richards leaned his back against the car. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped out two. “Wind's picking up,” he said. He lit hers and then his own.

“I noticed that. Thank you,” she said, for the cigarette, though the smell alone made her queasy. That very morning she'd gotten the phone call from the doctor's office: “The rabbit died,” the receptionist said. Nat would be having another baby sometime in early December.

She could hardly believe it: It was a surprising, overwhelming gift. She and Paul hadn't been trying
not
to have a baby, really, but their intimacy hadn't been consistent, either. Paul was under stress at work. He often came home quiet, chomping on his beer by the front window like a horse with a bit in its mouth. When Nat asked him what was wrong he muttered this and that: personalities on the job, sore back from too much lifting, his incompetent boss.

Other days he was lighter, smiling, catching her eye across the dinner table when the girls did something goofy. And he surprised her on occasion: bringing home the television set, offering to share the car. It must have been one of those days that the baby happened, and Nat liked the thought. She hoped the news would make him happy—that he'd focus on the sweetness of a newborn rather than the practicality of another mouth to feed. (A thought that frightened her a little, too—another child crying in the bassinet, clamoring for her attention, growing bigger by the day—but what could she do but be happy, and welcome the new little soul into their family, forever and ever?)

She decided she'd tell Paul after the girls went to sleep, a private time when they could relax and drink in the news together. They'd lie on the bed and speculate if this would be another girl, or their first boy; dark eyes like the rest of them, or blue like Nat's genetically underrepresented mother.

But for now, it was time to celebrate Paul's birthday. Time to inoculate him against gloom, to sow the seeds for her happy announcement later in the evening.

Being forced to mingle with Master Sergeant Richards before seeing Paul was a small glitch in her plan. Richards leaned against her car, smoking contentedly, his body blocking her view of the girls in the backseat. Sam's face must have been right behind his backside, but he didn't seem to mind covering her up. Nat thought she would have felt awkward pressing her bottom right over the face of someone's child who peered through a window.

“What about you?” he asked. Nat waited politely. He appeared to forget his question and then suddenly recall it. “When's your birthday?”

She hesitated. “Summer.”

“You're a summer baby.”

She forced a quick smile. “Yes.”

The car tipped from the girls' careening; she spied flashes of their clothes and the bright balloons. They were clambering into the front seat now. She turned her head to peer at the reactor building. “Will the men be out soon?”

“Hm?” Richards swung toward her, and then she had an inkling: He was tipsy. She smelled it on his breath, saw it in the too-wide swivel his head made. His delayed, walleyed joshing. She stepped back, her eyes darting to the girls in the front seat.

He leaned in, smiling. Then, to her horror, he began to recite: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou are more lovely and more tempting.”

She froze.

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” he murmured, with a distracted, self-regarding air.

“That's lovely,” she said finally. “That's—is that Shakespeare?”

“Yes, Shakespeare,” he said. “You're smart.” He blew a smoke ring, or tried to, with a steady
pop pop pop
of his lips, his neck retracting like a seal's. Coupled with his sudden poetry she felt as if he were having some quiet, almost dignified seizure.

“I don't meet many women who know poetry, who know Shakespeare,” he said in a burdened way.

“It was a lucky guess.” She held her cigarette and averted her eyes, not sure what to say. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” she asked. “Other than Shakespeare?”

“Not really, no.”

She nodded, looking toward the building and its closed door.

Then, to her immense surprise, he reached out and took a strand of her hair in two fingers, tucking it behind her ear. It was a gentle movement, not exactly lecherous, and she did not know how to extricate herself without insulting him. His cupped palm lingered at the back of her neck. He smiled at her as if the mere sight of her brought back a long-ago memory of a summer they had shared together, a beach house, tumultuous love. Where on earth was Paul?

A movement caught her eye and she quickly turned her head, but it was not Paul. It was a very thin silhouette, a stick figure almost, a man who headed first for the shallow dugout patch that marked the bus stop. He spied Nat and Sergeant Richards, however, and after a moment's hesitation started toward them.

“Hello, Master Sergeant,” said the young man, smiling stiffly, and Nat recognized him as the one they called “the kid,” Specialist Webb. He looked at her as if embarrassed for them all and said, “Hello, Mrs. Collier.” Then he noticed the balloons and the ecstatic bouncing of the girls in the front seat, and gestured to them with a quizzical smile.

“Oh. It's Paul's birthday,” Nat said, tucking her hair behind her ear over and over, the way Richards had done. “We're here to surprise him.”

Webb's face lit up in a wide, unselfconscious smile. “He has no idea!” he said. Then he stood, keeping his place between Nat and Sergeant Richards, and seemed unsure of what to do next. Nat noticed that he had a small tic, a pull on the edge of his smile. Here, there, again.

“Well,” Richards said, “I guess I'll be moving on. Webb, Nat.”

“Have a good day, Master Sergeant,” Webb said. Nat nodded but said nothing. For several seconds, however, Richards simply stood. Webb watched him with a sheepish but steadfast expression, and Nat realized that he had surmised Richards's state and was looking out for her. She felt a swell of gratitude.

“I guess I'll be going,” Richards said again.

“All right then, Master Sergeant.”

“Don't you forget, we're all going out tonight. Tell Collier,” he said, pointing to Nat.

“Right,” Webb said. “We'll meet at the Calico.”

“Oh,” said Nat, her heart sinking, “tonight?”

Webb nodded. “Slocum made shift supervisor so we're all going out. Franks is giving me and your husband a ride. This was just planned spur of the moment,” he added, as if wanting to make sure Paul didn't get an earful from her later.

“I see,” Nat said, trying to cover her disappointment. Today of all days—on his birthday, and with her news. The operators did not socialize outside work often, and if Richards were organizing this, Paul couldn't really say no.

“So what's the Calico?” she asked, forcing cheer into her voice.

Webb and Richards exchanged a glance. “It's just a bar,” Richards said. “We'll be having a few beers together, give Slocum a hard time.”

“Oh. All right.” She supposed this was all the answer she'd get. She let herself feel one good strong wash of self-pity—so pure it was almost pleasurable—and tried to let it go. She could tell Paul later. They'd give him his balloons now, and when he got home she'd deliver the news.

Richards winked at her. “Your Paul might make shift supervisor someday, too.”

Nat stared at him, suddenly bristling and not even sure what made her angriest: his smug, simpering tone; the “Your Paul” as if he were talking about an infant son; “might” dropped coyly into the mix like a turd in a punch bowl. Of
course
he would make shift supervisor; every man did, in turn. You'd have to be incompetent not to. She twisted sideways, looking off at the wind sock in the distance.