The Longest Night (26 page)

And there they were now, Meredith and Pastor Tim, walking over. Pastor Tim's swim trunks were covered with gigantic red hibiscus flowers. Meredith wore a terry cloth cover-up that made her look downright matronly. They seemed to think themselves the First Couple of Iggie's all of a sudden.

Forget them, Nat thought, her stomach giving one good turn. Pastor Tim caught her eye and she turned her head away. She didn't feel betrayed by him, because the whole event had been too stupid and embarrassing for a word like that. Instead she felt she had been given some kind of clairvoyance that allowed her to see people for what they really were. All of these folks would continue going to church and letting Pastor Tim lead them and give them advice, as if he were wise; but she was untouchable, she'd been inoculated against him.

“Pastor Tim's got reds,” Heidi said.

Nat turned to her. This sounded like nonsense. “What are reds?” she asked, thinking Heidi must be joking about the flowers on his stupid shorts.

“They're—pills,” Heidi whispered. Her nose wrinkled as if she were trying to reconcile Pastor Tim's mild, still-morally-upright creepiness with this bold, illicit move.

Nat tossed her wet hair behind her shoulder and slid one leg over the other. She was aware that this crossed leg was very bare, tan, and long, and she saw Pastor Tim glance at it. It made him seem so vapid that she stretched it and pointed her toe lazily for a moment just to bother him.

Pastor Tim leaned forward, smelling of Aqua Velva. His blue eyes looked widely excited and the front of his blond hair had been styled into a Kewpie doll point. “Seconal,” he said, opening his palm. “These babies will get us all so high you won't ever want to come down.”

Meredith gave a nervous laugh. “He says they're all kinds of fun.”

“Who's up for it?” Tim asked, looking around, his mouth slightly open. Nat's stomach rolled. “Anyone?”

“I guess I'll try one,” said Ed, but Tim seemed not to hear him. His eyes hopped from Heidi to Meredith to Nat.

Nat wasn't sure quite what possessed her. Maybe it was her impatience with everyone standing around, captivated by the power of the stupid pills; maybe it was her newfound superiority to Pastor Tim; maybe she just couldn't stand Meredith's anxious giggle and womanly waffling. “I'll go first,” she said.

“Just one,” said Pastor Tim. “These are very strong,” so Nat, looking him right in the eye, took two. “Wow,” he laughed, “way to go,” and passed her a beer.

Soon everybody had tried one, and Nat began to feel very loose. Pastor Tim put his hand on her knee and miraculously she didn't care, just leaned over into his shoulder. Then his laugh was a sudden turnoff and Nat wandered away, tiptoeing around the edge of the pool like a tightrope walker. Above her head the diving board pronged against the black sky. She made her way to the ladder and climbed up.

At the top she wavered. The tiki torches lifted and simmered, licked the pool, the sky; someone said, “Go, Nat!”

She paused. She slowly bobbed. Then, before she could think about it, she hurled herself backward into an arch.

There was the plummet, and should have been a revolution; instead she got only partway around and hit the surface, face-chest-thighs
slam
like a ton of bricks had been shot into her abdomen.

For several stunned seconds she sank. The total-body slap reverberated through her and she was immobilized, a bird who'd hit a window. Her lungs began to strain. Her head felt placidly dopey, unconcerned with all this lack of motion, the upward striving that should have been.

She took a breath and then the true shock came, water sucking in like a siphon, lungs shrieking
No, no, no
. Her whole body clanged. And thank God it did, that scream of self-preservation breaking through the surface, propelling her to the stairs, where she staggered up, stars exploding around her eyes, and vomited into the shrubbery.

No one had noticed the length of time she'd been under, the thirty or so seconds before it occurred to her to surface. She'd never felt so lonely.

She stayed at the party only a few minutes more. She forgot her bike at the Pettersons' and walked home, going back for it, a little embarrassed, the next day. But by then no one cared, because the news was breaking that Meredith Petterson and Pastor Tim had gone missing.

There was instantaneous panic, but it was short-lived: Within twenty-four hours they were found, sleeping blissfully and naked as babes, in an abandoned shed up the hill. Meredith had been painted from head to toe with the contents of an ancient, stinking can of petroleum jelly. As the story went Mr. Petterson found them snoring while a four-foot king snake studied them from the corner of the room. The details were precise and lurid. Nat found them conflating in her mind with the day's newspaper coverage of the Zeigler girl; she had trouble for a moment remembering which one had been found naked in the shed, Meredith Petterson or Marnie Zeigler (of course it was Meredith); the fact that she was obsessed with this at all suddenly steeled her resolve to roll the
Post-Register
into a tube and shove it in the wastebasket.

She would have hardly given Pastor Tim a second thought if he hadn't continued to plague her family. As soon as his activities with Meredith came to light, half the congregation, led by the priest, moved for his immediate dismissal. Some of them must have suspected early on that his interactions with the girls had gone beyond damp, prayerful hand-holding, and apparently it hadn't bothered them so long as he kept it discreet, but to be discovered the way he had was unforgivable. And the drugs involved—it was too much.

The other half of the congregation—including, to Nat's horror, her parents and brothers—sided with the disgraced pastor. This faction actually left the venerated stone chapel for a small former record store across town, where they crowded among leftover shelving to hold their own disorganized, poorly lit services and drink sugary wine out of Dixie cups. Pastor Tim led this spin-off, called the Improved Saint Ignatius Church, and Nat's father and brother George served as lay ministry.

“We've known Tim since he was yea high,” her mother had explained, holding her hand to her knee, when Nat had finally confronted her about their family's absurd loyalty. “He's a good kid, and the Cloones are a good family. Mike Cloone's an Elk, and his wife's a pediatric nurse.”

“But
they
don't even go to his church!” Nat had cried. “I saw him, Mom. I saw him giving the girls at the party pills.”

“We don't know what was in them. They could have been sugar pills.”

Nat sputtered. “Mom! He was
not
walking around handing out placebos!”

“Fine. I'm just saying what I heard.”

“From whom?”

“He and Meredith have split, you know.”

Nat stared at her. “I'm not interested,” she said.

Her mother, who seemed suddenly to have an elderly heart in a middle-aged body, adjusted her hands on her lap. “Good people sin and should be forgiven. Evil people seek only rebellion. That's Proverbs.”

“I'm not trying to rebel,” Nat said. She really wasn't. But she had been pushed into it.

She graduated high school, spent a year taking typing courses and then skipping out on them, going on dates here and there. She wasn't chaste. The big reveal with Pastor Tim had shown her that all the buildup, the mystery and fanfare, were for nothing. It was so simple! You did this, and this, and this, and it could be much more fun than it had been with Pastor Tim, and the world did not blow up in a ball of hellfire. You were not consumed instantly while demons chanted your name. It was a relief and a letdown all at once, but it seemed, for the first time, honest. Nat realized that she was attractive to men in an unexpected, athletic way, that she could influence them through simple actions: a wave, a smile. They were as malleable as children and as eager as dogs. It all made for a good time, but when it was over she felt lonely: None of them stayed around for long.

Her parents wouldn't give her the money for college—they believed everyone should earn his or her own way, as they had—and while Nat considered this fair, she also wasn't motivated enough to put together all that money. This was spoiled of her; it wasn't admirable. How could she recoil from her parents at every occasion while still living off them in her childhood bedroom?

It was Paul who'd gotten her out of her teenage stagnation. Just when she'd thought, with a somewhat overblown teenager's perception, that her life might be defined by the Improved Saint Ignatius Church and her parents' disapproval, that she was destined for nothing but occasional casual relationships and nothing real to show for them, Paul had dropped into her life wholly unexpectedly. He was a wonder—different than anyone she'd known: quiet and dark, formally chivalrous, so unlike the goofy, ponyish surfer boys she knew. He was still and thoughtful and serious. He listened closely to everything she said; whereas she'd barely seemed to register with Pastor Tim and the boys who followed, she meant everything to Paul. He was like an emissary from some other place, time out of mind, a land where people had meticulous, tender depths, where they behaved more carefully than modern men.

She'd wanted to elope, wanted to get the heck out of Dodge as fast as she could, thought marrying an army guy (and one she really did love) would whisk her away quick and easy; but it turned out army life was a little more complicated than all that, and until Paul got accepted to reactor school at Fort Belvoir she found herself with two little girls and somehow living at home,
still,
where her mother treated her like a child with children.

She kept a vestige of the faith she'd been raised with, a quiet view of God as someone who could occasionally be appealed to and wanted the best for people, but who did not often meddle in daily affairs or sports or politics. And indeed, despite the mixed things she'd done, her life had turned out well. She had her own home, or a rented one anyway. She had a yard with three tomato plants and a big muddy pit where the girls played. She had the exhausting luxury of being home with her children; she had a husband who provided for her. But sometimes, in dark and quiet moments, she wondered if she had married Paul too fast. It had all happened like lightning: courtship—marriage—baby—baby, and now a third on the way. Hadn't she just been nineteen? Wasn't it just yesterday she was standing at the top of the Sunset Cliffs, gripping rock with bare brown toes? For years she'd been convinced that Paul had saved her from something, from that sad, complacent quality she'd seen in people the night of Meredith's party, the part of them that was easy to take advantage of. But in gloomy moments she wondered if what she'd thought was brief clairvoyance hadn't actually been a combination of youth, defiance, and beer. Maybe she hadn't given herself a chance. Maybe she had seen a problem but jumped toward the wrong solution.

But no, she loved the girls, adored her family, cared for Paul in a way that was beyond love, beyond this life, that shocking intimacy of marriage and creation. How did anyone withstand it? It was like weaving your entrails together; it was beautiful and awful; of course it would bring up these startling feelings from time to time. Depressive thoughts, she reminded herself, weren't any more real than happy ones just because they were harder to have. But she couldn't help feeling a tiny bit sorry for herself, feeling antsy and sad, feeling that her parents had been trying to get rid of her, and Paul had helped them do it, and now he was thousands of miles away and she was alone, summer nearly over, the dishcloth-covered clock on the wall ticking quiet, desperate seconds.

She couldn't picture what Paul was doing, what his world was like, but he knew everything of hers: He had made it. This didn't seem fair. But she reminded herself he had made it out of love, and softened again.

Her mind wandered to Esrom. What was he doing this warm, breezy night? Maybe working on a car outside his new apartment by the beam of a big chrome light, maybe playing cards at the fire station in his undershirt. All right, so she didn't really need the part about the undershirt. Playing cards, then. Details were easy to come by. She was happy with this little train of thought but then had the sudden, baseless notion—rising up from who knew where—that his kindness, his friendly drop-ins, extended to other lonely wives like herself, and she came to her senses five minutes later wringing her skirt murderously in her hands.

She listened to the radio as she tidied up the kitchen: The Everly Brothers, the Five Satins with their heartbreaking
doo-wop, doo-wah
:
In the still of the night / I held you, held you tight,
the pauses in the last line that reached into her chest and wrung her breath out:
In the still…of…the…night
. Why did music need to be so soft and so sad? She swiped crumbs from the kitchen table, let them fall into her hand, tossed them into the trash. Circled a rag over the countertop and sang with Toni Fisher:
Watching that clock till you return / Lighting that torch and watching it burn.

The curtains flapped above her bed as she climbed in, alone, alone. She was, by her best guess, twenty-seven weeks pregnant. Paul would be home in fifteen weeks. These were the numbers she recited to herself at night, little hash marks in her brain.

When she was almost asleep, her mind, tired of numbers, fritzed to another plane, one that was already wholly extant and pre-supplied with story line. She was in a small bare room, sounds of rustling grass and birds outside, smell of oaks and flicker of distant light. Truck tires curved up the drive and parked just beside the wall; a figure got out and stood by the window. He peeked in, just to check on Nat, to make sure she was peacefully sleeping. This was very thoughtful, but Nat had known to expect him, and she'd left the window open, curtains flapping in the breeze. She loved this dusky dream, which was why she'd called it up night after night when her limbs felt too hot in the sheets, too overcome to be embarrassed by her quickened breathing, her hands brushing the tight hill of her belly, the space below it like a slice of peach; the five final seconds of sensation strong enough to drug her into thinking the hands, the breath, hadn't just been her own.