The Longest Night (29 page)

Patrice waited.

Just say yes,
Nat told herself.
Don't be so stupid!
She opened her mouth, shut it again.

“Fine,” Patrice said, the word quiet with rage. She plucked her coat and scarf from the back of the chair and strode for the girls' bedroom. “Carol
Ann
!” Nat heard her say, adding, with frantic sweetness, “We need to leave, sweetheart.”

“You hafta go so soon?” Sam asked.

“No
back
talk, Sam!” Nat cried. A moment later Sam's perplexed face peered around the corner. Patrice wove past her, tugging Carol Ann by the hand. In an instant they were through the kitchen and the living room, a swirl of chilly air marking their exit as the front door opened and slammed.

Liddie shuffled around the corner, still dressed in layers of absurd clothing, crying now. “Why they go, Mama?” she asked.

Nat bolted to the television as if it were some lifesaving device and turned the power knob, and it worked its instant magic; the girls drifted toward it, their tears drying up, mouths slightly open. Then she fled into the back room so she could cry in peace. She sprawled on her side on the bed, pinched off fingerfuls of snot, pounded the pillow, while in her tight-stretched belly the baby rolled and turned, pushing in all directions, as if it had a dozen fists.

T
HE EVENING SEEMED INTERMINABLE,
but somehow she got the girls fed and bathed and into bed with a story. The round clock on the wall made one tiny click after another, magnifying her loneliness. Finally she yanked it down entirely, pulled out the batteries, and buried it in a back closet between a stack of old blankets, pressing a quilt over its blank unmoving face. For a moment she felt better, but when she returned to the dark living room, her heart sank again.

Eventually she dozed on the couch, on her back with her round island of belly rising up. She felt too sad to sleep in the bedroom at the back of the house; on the couch she felt somehow more connected to the world, as if she weren't so alone.

Sometime after midnight she heard the quiet drag of tires in the street. Groggily, she sat up. An engine rattled softly just outside. She got to her feet, pulled her afghan around her shoulders, and peeked out the front window. A few hard, tiny snowflakes whirled from the sky, not enough to collect anywhere, yet.

Her heart jumped when she saw Esrom's truck, dim in the moonlight, start to pull away.

What was he doing here? She kicked her feet into her slippers and stepped outside, waving her arm over her head. The wind whistled right through the blanket and she shivered, hurrying down the walk. He looked back at her, hesitated, and then put the truck in reverse until it was in front of the house.

“Hi,” she whispered, her eyes darting to nearby dark windows. If people saw them now, who knew what they'd think? “What is it? Are you all right?”

He could hardly meet her eyes. “I'm fine,” he said. “It's freezing. You should go back inside.”

“What in the world are you doing out here?”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Why?”

He was staring down at his hands. His cheeks looked cold, his nostrils slightly glistening; the tiny, thin lines at the corners of his eyes seemed as if they had been drawn there by the tip of a needle. “I was just driving home from the station,” he said. “I have this thing—”

“You have what thing?” Nat said gently, confused and flattered.

“Well, I just have this thing where when I come home from the late shift, I circle around by your place and make sure everything looks okay, and then I head home.”

“Oh,” Nat said. Her house was not even remotely on the way to his apartment from the testing station; it was significantly out of the way. But he was so flustered that she wanted to be careful with his feelings.

“It's all right,” she said, “it's really fine.” And the truth was she liked it more than fine, she liked it quite well. Now she couldn't squelch the thrill that was running through her: It was as if she had called this habit of his into being through her own little dreams, and she felt excited and cared for and somehow powerful. “How long have you been doing this?” she asked.

“A couple weeks. I'm really sorry. It's a strange thing to do. I didn't mean any harm by it.”

“I know that. I know. I just…I'll admit it. It makes me feel special, actually.”

He tried to smile but it came and went quickly.

“So!” she said briskly, realizing there was no way to make this chat seem normal. “How was work tonight?”

“Fine. Couple false alarms at one of the reactors.” His eyes darted to her and she wondered if, by his hesitation, he meant Paul's reactor but didn't want to mention her husband by name. In any case, there were more than two dozen reactors out at the testing station; surely some of the others were equally troublesome. So she didn't need to ask, which was a relief because some part of her, though she hated to admit it, didn't want to mention Paul, either.

“So, I thought of something,” she said. “I know this will sound silly, and it's not even necessary, it's nothing at all—”

He nodded.

“Do you think when you come over from now on, you could maybe ride the bus?”

“Oh,” he said. He thought for a moment. “Oh, so my truck won't always—”

“Yeah.”

“Does it, is there something—”

“No. Not at all. But it just sits out there. You know, for a long time.”

“Right.”

“And people are really silly about stuff like that.”

“Okay.”

“People are ridiculous.” Nat felt her face flush; she thought of Patrice's stone-cold judgment, Jeannie's snide, probing questions, and her stomach squeezed. She felt angry that such unpleasant thoughts were intruding on her happiness. And the flip side of that was that this happiness should not exist, which was becoming clearer by the second even though she was acting like they could just tiptoe around it.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did something come up? Did this—did I cause you trouble?”

“No,” she lied.

His face narrowed with concern. “People are dumb if they think that. What? They wouldn't want someone looking after their own wife, or their sister?”

Nat blanched, thinking maybe there really was nothing more to this than his brotherly concern, which should have been reassuring but was somehow galling. It mortified her to think she might be more invested in his visits than he was.

But no, no. Here he was at midnight. His truck idling by her house. At midnight, goddamnit, and Nat was being a good person, she was not doing anything wrong, but damn that Patrice and damn Jeannie Richards and damn all of them if they came poking around at something that was making her feel happy. If they didn't have anything special, if their relationships were all so staid and normal and taped down along the lines…

“Nat, are you okay?”

“Esrom,” she blurted, “be honest. You really think of me just like family, a sister?”

Instantly, she realized she should not have asked. She was about to end everything, because once their relationship was called out by name, it would have to stop. What did she expect him to say? What did she want him to?

His hands, loose in his lap, flattened on his jeans; his shoulders stiffened. He was so visibly squirming, so obviously afflicted, that she felt sorry for having said it out loud.

“I don't know how to answer that,” he finally managed.

“Oh, it's okay,” she said quickly. “Don't worry about it—”

“I like being around you,” he said. “I like that…” He faltered, took a breath, started up again. “Well, you know, most of the time I think people are just shitty to each other. But with us, it's like we can just be as nice to each other as we want, and we take care of each other, and yeah, I think you're beautiful, and it's almost like, I don't know, a fairy tale.” His face had gone white and he said, “I sound like a fuckin' idiot.”

Nat had never heard him curse that strongly before and she let out a small sympathetic laugh, though she thought she might cry. “You don't sound like an idiot,” she said.

She stared at him, at his handsome-in-its-own-way face, and realized the depth of her affection for him. She tried to give herself a breakneck version of her spiel about
things just adding more good to the world
. It wasn't working. It hadn't convinced Patrice and it wasn't convincing her. She had asked the question, and now he'd answered it, and now she had ruined everything. There was no way to take it back.

“Esrom, I think you're a wonderful person,” she started, hating herself.

As soon as she said it his head snapped back a little. “Don't worry,” he said. “I'll go now.”

“No, I didn't mean—”

“I know what you're gonna say, and you're right. I should never have come over so much. I should never have started driving by. It was selfish of me. I could have brought trouble on you, much more trouble than I'd get into myself. Your”—he fumbled a little—“your husband will be coming home soon. He sure ain't going to want me loitering.”

Now Nat did spot a sliver of light in Edna Geralds's window. She turned her back and hunched toward Esrom, hoping it was dark enough to obscure her for a few moments more.

“Could you tell the girls good-bye for me?” he was saying. “I don't want them to think I just forgot about them.”

“Oh, the girls,” she cried. “They'll miss you so much.”

“I'll come by and get the car tomorrow,” he went on. She could see the effort it took for him to speak, the way he took his sorrow and shoved it into this absurd, manly to-do list. “Don't you worry about it, I'll take care of it. Can you get to the shop to pick up your other one?”

She could not think of anything she cared about less at that moment. “Sure. Yeah.”

“Call them first, make sure they have it ready.”

She held herself around her belly, feeling bitter and lost and full of sadness, angry at Jeannie and Patrice and her neighbors, angry, unfairly, at Paul. What she wanted to do was beg Esrom not to stop driving by at night. She wanted to hear that quiet grind of tires straight from her dream, to know for a fact that someone was thinking of her.
Please,
she wanted to say,
keep doing it, at least a while longer,
and then I won't be so lonely and I won't hate everyone.
But there was no way she could say this, no proper way to ask for it, because it was not a proper request. It was improper to be lonely; it was improper to be bored; it was improper, most of all, to be filled with anything like longing. And even if you were good and stayed in your house and loved your children and your husband—and, yes, she did love her husband—people could sniff out this longing in you; they had pointed fingers at Nat for as long as she could remember, hissing
That one, that one is not satisfied
. Because there was no cure for it, it was worse than any one thing you might actually do.

He said, “I can't believe you're going to have your baby and I'll never see you again.”

He said, “If you need help of any kind, you know, if you're in a bind of some sort, you can still call me.”

He said, “I should have been more careful, because I never thought you were my sister.”

P
aul had first spotted the delegation
of
visitors—some American congressmen whom Paul didn't know, and two Danish officials—when he was sitting in the chow hall, hunkered over a bowl of split pea soup. They shuffled in behind the lieutenant colonel who was giving them a tour, each man bundled identically in parkas and gloves and hats with earflaps. Master Sergeant Richards was easy to recognize because of his height and the fact that he looked so absolutely peeved in this getup, his arms at his sides as if they had been tied there.

Of course it was only a matter of minutes until the group reached Paul's table, and he'd stood with the others to salute. The colonel gave a short talk about the visitors, then spied Paul and pointed. “Ah, here's another nuclear man,” he said, pushing Richards stiffly over like someone trying to set up a reluctant couple on a date. And then Paul and Richards had been eyeball to eyeball for an uncomfortable minute.

“Hello, Master Sergeant,” Paul said. From the corner of his eye he could see Mayberry bobbing up and down with excitement.

Richards's blue eyes flicked to him. “How are you, Collier?” he said flatly, and they shook hands.

“I'm just fine.”
Loving it here at Camp Century.

“I think, Sergeant Richards,” the colonel piped in, “you'll be thrilled to see firsthand how much your CR-1 has contributed to the development of our beautifully functioning PM-2A.”

Paul and Richards stared at the colonel. “I expect to be thrilled,” Richards said, and he shuffled toward the exit with the rest of the group.

P
AUL DODGED
R
ICHARDS MOST
of the next day, but encountered him again that evening walking down the main tunnel. As much as he didn't want to, it had to be done: “Master Sergeant,” Paul called, and picked up his pace.

Richards turned with an expression that was either blank or disdainful. He pointed to himself. “Me?”

“I wanted to speak with you,” Paul said.

Richards watched him from an arm's length away.

“I wanted to apologize for what I did back in Idaho Falls,” he said, willing himself to look Richards in the eye. “The incident at your house. I was out of line. I think we should try our best to put it behind us because we'll have to work together when we get back to the CR-1—”

“We won't be working together for long,” Richards said.

“Sorry?” There was an ominous sound to this; was there something Paul didn't know?

“I'll be transferring back out to Fort Belvoir in February,” Richards said.

“Oh,” said Paul, trying not to brighten visibly.

“I'm leading training on the simulator there.”

“Congratulations.” Paul wondered if this development somehow nullified his truce offering.

Richards shrugged. “It'll be easy. What can go wrong when you work the simulator?” He gave Paul an oddly vacant grin. “So we'll only have six weeks together on your precious reactor once you get back to Idaho Falls, and then I'll be out of there for the rest of my life.”

“Oh. Well, good, I guess.” This was more of a relief, in fact, than Paul could let on. “How
is
the reactor? I suppose you've got that new core up and running. Probably a relief to have everything working so smoothly—”

“Bah,” Richards said. “The new core? Right. That's not coming until next spring.”

“Oh,” said Paul, his heart sinking. “I thought it would be in by now.”

Richards shook his head. He almost seemed to enjoy this scandalous, disappointing news. “They'll push that back till kingdom come. We'd be
lucky
to get one in the spring. Harbaugh died, did you hear?”

“No, I didn't,” Paul said, feeling genuinely sad. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well, we all knew it was coming.”

“I guess so. His family—how are they doing?”

“I don't know,” Richards said. “Think they left town.”

“So the reactor,” Paul tried to circle back. “Is it still getting the stuck rods, is it—”

“Collier, for Christ's sake, don't be such a nag. Are you trying to piss me off some more, or are you going to actually smooth this over like you seem to have set out to do?”

Paul swallowed. He
had
been trying to make things better, and maybe standing there prodding Richards about the reactor again, like he'd done in their worst encounter back in Idaho, was not the way to go about it.

Richards looked around. “So,” he said with a sweep of his arm, “I've already toured your reactor. I've seen your weather station and your mess hall, which you all are so strangely proud of, and some tall fellow even showed me a room full of ice tubes. You've all gone insane up here, is what I think.”

“Could be.”

“What do you fellas do in the evenings? Cry to the chaplain?”

“There's a club we go to.”

“Oh, I've heard of this club,” Richards said.

“We
call
it a club, anyway.”

“What do you have at this club? Dancing? You boys dance with each other?”

“It may come to that, eventually.”

“It's open tonight, right?”

“Yeah, it's open,” Paul said, warily. He did not have a good track record with escorting Richards to drinking establishments.

“Think the asshole who punched me in the face can buy me a beer?”

Paul did not know what to say. His heart sank at the same time he felt relieved: They weren't enemies. But they were right back where they'd started.

Richards slapped him on the shoulder. “You poor kid! You really don't know your ass from a hole in the ground, do you? Listen, if I had my way you'd be sitting out in front of the public assistance office right now, cryin' for a job. I think you owe me a beer. You owe me a few.” He was actually grinning. His hand was on Paul's shoulder as if they were friends. He may as well have been dangling Paul upside down by the feet and shaking him for quarters, while telling him he'd been promoted.

“I can buy you a beer, Sergeant,” Paul said.

He did not really want to have one beer with this man, let alone “a few,” but there was no excuse on this earth that he could possibly make. He didn't know if his apology had gone staggeringly better than he'd expected, or if Richards was still silently loathing him, or if the man would just take a free beer from anybody. But considering that a beer at the club was only a nickel, Paul felt that this must be a primarily symbolic gesture. He and Richards walked down the ice tunnel.

“So how's the family?” Richards asked.

“They're fine,” Paul said, though he didn't really want to talk about them with Sergeant Richards. “Nat's in a family way, you might have heard. She's about eight months along now.”

“Another baby? You two dirty little rabbits!” Richards crowed. It was remarkable how even the mere mention of a couple of beers could make Richards act as if he'd already had them. “She must be as round as a watermelon.”

“I guess so,” Paul said, and managed to keep himself from adding
I haven't seen her in five months,
because it sounded accusatory.

“Did I ever tell you about the watermelons we grew on Nanumea?” Richards said. “Pure gold inside, sweetest you ever tasted. Not too huge, about the size of a football. We'd throw 'em over the water and blast 'em with our Tommy guns, and holy hell, if those things didn't explode like a pig stuffed with confetti.”

This was an odd transition from talking about his wife, but Paul wasn't going to get particular. He pointed to a Quonset hut, no different from any of the others, and said, “So, here's the club.”

The hut was crowded because it was the only place to be, and the moment the door closed behind them they were engulfed in stuffiness, the smell of recycled breath and long-bundled bodies, coats hanging like seal skins from the wall. Like any of the other barracks it was a windowless, nailed-board tunnel. The floor was covered with thin beige carpeting marked by seeping, concentric stains. There were a handful of couches and chairs around the room, and a wet bar tended by a Filipino steward. A stereo was playing, which everyone depended on because it was the only thing capable of adding atmosphere.

The steward, a quiet man named Palacios who must have felt his life had taken its most punishing turn, said hello and passed Paul a San Miguel. “I owe this man a beer,” Paul said, pointing to Richards, who said he'd changed his mind and wanted a whiskey instead.

Paul nodded to Mayberry and to Benson, who was staring openly; Mayberry, it turned out, wasn't great at keeping secrets. Benson, grinning, fisted his hands and threw an imaginary punch behind Richards's back.

“Good evening, Master Sergeant,” everyone said.

“Collier here tells me this whiskey tastes like shit,” Richards said happily. “To Camp Century! My heart bleeds for you poor sons of bitches.” He raised his glass, socked the whiskey down his throat, and then headed back to the bar for another.

“And the lion laid down with the lamb,” Benson marveled when he had gone.

“Which one of them is the lamb?” Mayberry asked.

“Thanks for bringing the supe to our party.”

“Sorry,” Paul shrugged. “He just followed me home. Let him talk and he'll be fine.” He pointed at Mayberry. “Behave yourself.”

Richards sauntered back to them along with the two Danish officials. “Hallo,” said the first, whom Richards introduced as Sorensen, a ruddy man with shiny, almost waxen skin and a flop of strawberry-blond hair. “I see you're taking part in Denmark's favorite pastime.”

“Being bored, and sitting in an igloo?” Benson asked. Then he reddened and said, “With all due respect, sir.”

“I am a civilian. There's no need for ‘sir,' ” Sorensen said. Benson moved over to give the two Danes his space on the couch.

“He meant drinking,” Hansen said. “Bottoms up.”

Conversation rolled along, remarkably amicable, with pauses filled by steady imbibing; most of the men had heard one another's stories. Richards launched into tales from his time in Nanumea and seemed to genuinely enjoy himself. Paul felt sleepy and oddly satisfied. Maybe when he got back to Idaho Falls, things would be different. They'd head into the new year and get a new supervisor, someone who might actually take action to improve things. And he and Richards might even go out on a good note.

Clinking glasses, the murmur of voices, radio bopping along; Paul leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He heard Roy Orbison's “Only the Lonely,” with its spasms of bass drum like knocks on the door; Connie Francis's cute honk, her sweep of trilling backup singers:
There are no exceptions to the rule / Yes, everybody's somebody's fool
.

“So what's the first thing you're going to do when you get home, Collier?” Benson asked.

From where he was sitting Richards blurted, “I'm going to go skiing. The slopes are perfect right now. Snow looks like icing on a cake.”

There was a pause, and when Paul felt it was respectful, he answered the question. “Well, kiss my wife and kids,” he said. “Smoke a cigar.”

“You smoke cigars?”

“Not usually.”

“I'm going to get my boys a puppy,” Benson said. “Little black cocker spaniel with a red bow.”

“Get an Alsatian,” Richards murmured from his armchair. Everyone ignored him.

“We could name it Sookie,” said Benson, still on the subject of his fantasy puppy. “Or Sooty. Which one is better?”

“How about Blackie?” asked Richards. “Because it'll be all black.”

“Or maybe Four-Legs,” whispered Mayberry, “ 'cause it'll have four legs.”

Paul stifled a laugh into his beer. The group quieted for a moment, and a thought came to him. “I'm going to get Nat a new car,” he said, feeling suddenly inspired. “It'll be brand-new and all hers. She can drive it to the store, to the reservoir, wherever she likes.” He couldn't help but smile. This was the best idea he'd ever had.