The One Who Got Away: A Novel (23 page)

Olivine and Henry were seated up
front, next to Christine and Artie on one side and Yarrow’s family on the
other. It was hot and the sun bleated down, and she had to be careful not to
shift her weight on the aluminum folding chair or the heat would cut right
through her dress.

She had never before been to a
military funeral. Hundreds of men and women, sweltering on the lawn, coming to
pay tribute to a veteran, a carpenter, a father, a grandfather, a friend.  

Olivine looked at Henry’s hand,
clasped in her own. This hand, bronzed from the sun, fingertips rough with tiny
woodcuts and splinters. This hand that she would be holding until the end.

In the months between her
grandmother’s funeral and, this, her grandfather’s, Olivine and Henry had
traveled the world, both of them seeking new source material. Henry’s material
was wood: the veneers of old world churches, benches, and barns. And Olivine’s
source material was experiences and ideas and stories, which she strung
together like pearls on a string. She had written a book, to be published the
following fall, filled with essays about the things they encountered. The gems
and tiny miracles they saw each day.
Unfettered,
it was to be titled.

But, by then, they would be
fettered. At least a bit. She was three months along, and she moved Henry’s
hand now to rest on the tiny baby bump willing itself into the world, pushing
against her skin each day, and sending a fullness into her throat and into her
belly. She and Henry would take their child  along with them on their travels until
they decided, together, to live in a different way.

As the ceremony drew to a close,
she spotted Paul, standing near the back. It was nice of him to come. She waved
toward him and he gave her a sheepish grin and put his arm around his new wife.
A nurse with kind, hazel eyes. Coco. She whispered something in his ear, and he
smiled.

Christine and Artie had asked
Henry to create a wooden capsule for Grandpa’s ashes, and he had, piecing
together the wood from Grandpa’s life and securing it with nails from his
workbench. Olivine had sat beside Henry as he made it; as he chose each piece.

A blast cracked the air, and then
another, and then another. Three volleys from a rifle, fired by young men,
standing tall in white gloves and starched uniforms, who then presented she and
Christine and Yarrow each with an empty shell casing, and Olivine held hers for
a moment, the hot metal stinging her hand, and then she slid it into her pocket
where it would be stay, no matter where she took it next.

THE END