The Longest Night (33 page)

She made a Swiss steak for dinner. Even in his anger, Paul wouldn't have told her how much steak he'd choked down at Camp Century, how he'd be content never to see it again. Then she gave Sam and Liddie their baths while he sat in the armchair, obediently wearing his slippers and holding baby Sadie, who slept. He couldn't remember if it was typical for a newborn to sleep this much. He studied her rosy, satiny face, the tiny white bumps across the top of her nose, and the faint blue veins at the temples, while Doris, with occasional groans, mopped the kitchen, and the girls splashed and giggled and whined in the bathtub down the hall.

There was the spiraling gurgle of water down the drain, and Sam and Liddie came careening out of the bathroom in a waft of warm air and shampoo scent, their wet hair flying, nightgowns flapping around their clean pink knees. “We want you to read our bedtime story, Daddy!” Sam cried, clambering onto his lap. Liddie looked a little less sure. She hung back around Nat for a moment; she had always been a mama's girl.

“Watch out for the baby,” Paul said, holding Sadie to the side.

“Daddy will read, and you can sit on my lap,” Nat offered. They went into the girls' room and Sam sat on her bed close to Paul; Liddie leaned back against Nat; the baby was laid in her bassinet in the master bedroom. Paul read them a book in which an orphaned elephant moved to London and became friends with an old lady, then returned to Africa to rule as king after the previous king ate a poisoned mushroom and died. The girls listened with rapt attention and Sam wanted to study the picture of the first elephant king turning green, his face crumpling, as the poisoned mushroom took his life. “All right, climb into bed,” Paul said, but Liddie piped up, “Wait, our prayers!” and she knelt by Sam's bed with her hands folded.

“Why,” grumbled Sam, “do we hafta do this just because Grandma Radek came into town?”

“Sam,” Nat hissed. “Knees. Now.”

Paul stood quietly off to the side as Nat knelt with them. Their three dark heads bowed in unison. Nat asked each girl what she was grateful for that day. Sam said, “Daddy coming home!” and beamed up at Paul, then pressed her face onto her hands again. Liddie said she was grateful for baby Sadie, which was unexpected because Paul had not seen her so much as look at the baby the entire day. Sam, too, found this preposterous: “You're supposed to say you're thankful for
Daddy,
” she hissed, through gritted teeth.

“Sam,” Nat said gently, “we can't control other people's prayers.”

Sam glared at Liddie. “Mama
said
we're supposed to be thankful for Daddy coming home safe. Remember?”

Liddie's face seemed to gather some rare force of will.
“Be….quiet,”
she said.

Sam, galled and stunned, burst into tears. “You always say the stupidest prayers!” she shouted.

“Girls!” Nat cried. “Your father did not travel all the way home from Greenland to hear you fighting like animals.”

“How do you think God feels,” interjected Doris, appearing in the doorway so suddenly that they all jumped, “when he hears selfish little girls arguing when they are supposed to be praying?”

Paul felt sorry for Nat. She must have known he'd be critical of this whole routine anyway, and probably thought he was just sitting there smirking inwardly at how awry it had gone. She couldn't win, with her mother finding the prayers inadequate and Paul thinking them unnecessary. In reality, he did not so much disapprove as pity the girls for being ganged up on at prayer time.

Nat rushed them through the Lord's Prayer, chided Sam for not participating, and shooed them into bed.

“Good night,” said Paul, hugging and kissing them each in turn.

“I'm glad you're home, Daddy,” said Sam.

He patted her knee one last time under the sheets. “I missed you girls.”

“Now go to sleep,” said Nat. “No talking. It's very late.”

The living room was soundless except for the intermittent gurgle-pop of the radiator. Doris sat in the smaller armchair, her hands folded on her lap and her eyes closed. She was either praying, sleeping, or pretending to pray or sleep, which was her way of giving Paul and Nat privacy. Her hair was in curlers and her face gleamed beneath its thick nightly layer of Mercolized Wax.

“Can I get you anything?” Nat asked Paul. “Cake? Ice cream?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

She nodded, still standing by the couch. Her hair fanned loose from its ponytail; her eyes were darkened by half moons. She'd given birth just two weeks ago. Beneath her skirt her stomach bulged in a small, fluid-filled hill, and Paul had glimpsed faintly rust-stained tissue paper in the bathroom waste bin, though the next time he'd walked into the bathroom it was gone.

“You should probably go to bed,” he said.

“I know.” She worked up a tired smile. “But I wanted to hear your stories about Greenland.”

“There's not much to tell. I just went to the reactor every day. It was like the CR-1, but it worked better.”

“What were your friends like?”

“They were fine. Just normal soldiers.”

“Was the food awful?”

“Not really.”

Nat nodded. She laid her hands over her belly as if it made her self-conscious. “Well, should we turn in then?”

Paul hesitated. “Why don't you? I might stay up and watch TV for a while.”

“Really? You like TV now?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

“Well,” she brightened, “I'll sit up with you.”

Paul was quiet. He did not want her to sit with him on the couch. He did not want to have to watch her face, with its constant stream of quiet emotions. He did not want to force himself to return her conversation, as if he still found her trustworthy, as if they could talk the way they had before he'd left. But he was also scared to stop pretending, because if they began to talk about what had happened when he was away he didn't know where it would end up or what he would have to do about it.

Nat came around the front of the couch and slid next to him, fitting her head lightly against his shoulder. He could feel that her body was not at ease, but she was trying. It was excruciating to be so close to her after six months of lonely dreaming and torturous sensual thoughts. Every part of her held a distilled power: her arm against his, breath rising lightly in her chest, the gentle curve just above her upper lip. His desire for closeness, the sudden and indulgent opportunity for it after all this time, seemed a cruel thing coupled with his hurt and anger. He attempted to breathe slowly, as if he were undergoing some painful medical procedure or trying to avoid nausea. In through the nose, out through the mouth. His mind felt unstable. He was worried that he might stand up and start to shout at her. He did not think that he could tolerate another second with her sitting next to him.

He was saved by the baby, who began to warble from her bassinet in the bedroom. At first Nat sat listening to see if she would settle down, but her little yaps and groans increased in urgency, until she started to work up a newborn's croaky, vibrating cry.

Doris, sitting bolt upright across from them and now most certainly pretending to be asleep, opened her eyes and said in a fully awake voice, “The baby's crying.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Nat said, “but if
you
can hear the baby and you're sitting right across from us, don't you think we can hear her, too?”

“Don't worry,” Doris said. “I'll be heading home on Tuesday, and you won't have to listen to my nagging anymore.”

These two women had been alone together far too long. “It's not that,” Nat said, twitching with irritation. “It's just that of course we can hear the baby—”

“I'm only trying to help.”

“Of course you are,” said Nat, in a smaller voice.

Doris closed her eyes again. Her face beneath its jelly reflected light like a small, placid lake.

Nat got up and went into the bedroom. A moment later Paul heard her talking to Sadie in a quiet, fond voice, and for a moment he thought his heart would break. Then he got up, turned off the living room lights, pulled a knit afghan from the back of his armchair, and yanked it to his chin.

Across from him, Doris opened one eye.

“You can have my easy chair,” Paul told her. “It's more comfortable than that one.”

“I would never take your special chair,” Doris said, as if he were a possessive child.

“I'm asking you to.”

“Aren't you going to go sleep in—”

“Good night, Doris.”

She stayed where she was, that shadowy gargoyle. Paul lay still until he was almost able to forget that she was there. From where he lay he could see out the window where the stars looked impossibly high and cold. A few whorls of snow spun past that would amount to nothing. Paul tried not to do it, but his mind returned to the vision of Nat with another man, talking, laughing, letting him into this living room over and over. His mind seized on the house's front door and he saw Nat opening it, wearing a pretty dress, smiling; but not for him. She was happy to see someone whom he could not picture. It hardly mattered whether or not something had “happened.” Spending time with a strange man, accepting his car, all this with your husband thousands of miles away, was wrong in and of itself. It meant that his trust in her was a fiction, and that the beauty of his life back home, the one thing he'd counted on, was a half truth, too. His jealousy turned to disgust and then to a physical illness in his stomach that almost made him writhe.

Nat came back down the hallway, froze in surprise when she saw that the lights were out, and whispered, “Paul?” She waited where she stood, repeating his name once more. Then he heard her retreat into their bedroom, shutting the door behind her with a quiet click.

After a long while, Doris's breathing turned slow and huffy. He felt relieved that she finally slept, although her repeated breaths—each one starting up with a quiet, wet gurgle, like a coffeepot—drove him nearly mad if he concentrated on them. He yanked a small pillow over his head to muffle the sound. Through a small space between the afghan and the pillow, he could see a slit of window, spidery with frost, and the sky black as ink behind it.

“
W
ELL, WOULD YOU LOOK
at who's back!” Franks boomed as Paul stepped through the lunchroom door. “It's Nanook of the North.”

The scene was just as Paul had remembered, the guys sitting with their lunch pails, the television on, the smell of coffee.

“Collier,” Webb said, raising a hand, and he looked genuinely happy to see Paul. Next to Webb, another young man—Paul's temporary replacement—got to his feet.

“You remember Webb,” Franks began.

Paul gave him a look and crossed the room to shake Webb's hand. “How could I not remember Webb?”

“And this is Sidorski. He's from Chicago.”

They shook. “So you're the one who's been holding this outfit together, then?”

“By the skin of my teeth,” Sidorski said.

“Say, Webb,” said Paul, “you
got
a new tooth.”

Webb blushed. “I did,” he said. He tapped the new front tooth with one finger; it was somewhat whiter than its mates. He looked older with the hole filled. “It's porcelain,” he explained. “Turns out it wasn't as expensive as I thought it would be.” Then, suddenly shy, he smiled with his mouth closed.

“It looks good,” Paul said.

“Yeah, you're both beautiful,” said Franks. “Collier, did you hear about the break? They're shutting down the reactor altogether over Christmas.”

“Huh,” said Paul. “That's strange. What's the thinking behind that?” They occasionally ran test SCRAMs on the reactor, shutting it down by dropping the nine rod to the bottom of the core, but it was always restarted within hours, never left to sit for weeks.

“The engineering guys thought it would be good to rest the control rods,” said Franks. “With all the trouble they've been having.”

“We all wish they'd just leave it shut down till the new core arrives,” said Webb.

Franks explained, “The twenty-first is our last day before the break. Then we start up again after the New Year, January third.”

“Two weeks off,” Webb said with a shrug. “Not half-bad.”

“Which shift gets the joy of restarting this thing?” Paul asked.

“The night shift,” said Franks. “Don't worry, we'll be on days again by then. They'll do all the heavy lifting; we come in first thing in the morning and take over from there.”

“It's good luck for us,” Sidorski pointed out.

“I feel a little guilty,” said Webb.

Franks handed Paul the restart to-do list. The chores were familiar because Paul had done the procedure before. He didn't envy the men who'd be on the overnight restart crew.
Secure feedwater valves to isolate rod drive seals from feedwater pump pressure,
the chore list said.
Disconnect inlet and outlet lines to rod drive seal assembly. Remove tie-rod studs. Remove pinion shaft extension from thimble,
and on and on it would go, into the night. If all went according to plan, by the time his shift got there on the morning of January 4, the machine would be up and humming again after its cold, silent weeks.

“The damn thing's worse than ever,” said Franks. “Even Richards admits it's ridiculous. He's almost sympathetic about it, when he's not off drinking in his plywood palace.”

“What if we just didn't restart?” Paul said, surprising even himself, speaking the idea as it came. “What if we all just said no, we're going to wait until that new core comes? We're not restarting with this goddamn core?”

The men stared at him. His heart pounded with his own rashness.

“We'd be AWOL,” Franks said.