Killer, Come Back to Me

Still alive? He still breathed, yes, and walked around through the other years, yes, but alive? No.

It was she who gained strength and lived through his attempt to escape her. She never forgave his trying to run off.

“What do you mean by that, what do you mean?” I remember her screaming at him as he lay feeling his throat, in the cottage, his eyes shut, wilted, and I hurried in the door. “What do you mean doing that, what, what?”

And looking at him there I knew he had tried to run away from both of us, we were both impossible to him. I did not forgive him that either, for a while. But I did feel my old hatred of him become something else, a kind of dull pain, as I turned and went back for a doctor.

“What do you mean, you silly boy?” she cried.

* * *

I married Paul that autumn.

After that, the years poured through the glass swiftly. Once each year, Roger led himself into the pavilion to sit eating mint ice with his limp empty-gloved hands, but he never called me by my name again, nor did he mention the old promise.

Here and there in the hundreds of months that passed I thought, For his own sake now, for no one else, sometime, somehow he must simply up and destroy the dragon with the hideous bellows face and the rust-scaled hands. For Roger and only for Roger, Roger must do it.

Surely this year, I thought, when he was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two. Between seasons I caught myself examining occasional Chicago papers, hoping to find a picture of her lying slit like a monstrous yellow chicken. But no, but no, but no.…

I’d almost forgotten them when they returned this morning. He’s very old now, more like a doddering husband than a son. Baked gray clay he is, with milky blue eyes, a toothless mouth, and manicured fingernails which seem stronger because the flesh has baked away.

At noon today, after a moment of standing out, a lone gray wingless hawk staring at a sky in which he had never soared or flown, he came inside and spoke to me, his voice rising.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” I said, scooping out his ice cream before he asked for it.

“One of the maids just mentioned, your husband died five years ago! You should have told me!”

“Well, now you know,” I said.

He sat down slowly. “Lord,” he said, tasting the ice cream and savoring it, eyes shut, “this is bitter.” Then, a long time later, he said, “Anna, I never asked. Were there ever any children?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t know why. I guess I’ll never know why.”

I left him sitting there and went to wash the dishes.

At nine tonight I heard someone laughing by the lake. I hadn’t heard Roger laugh since he was a child, so I didn’t think it was him until the doors burst wide and he entered, flinging his arms about, unable to control his almost weeping hilarity.

“Roger!” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! O

h, nothing!” he cried. “Everything’s lovely! A root beer, Anna! Take one yourself! Drink with me!”

We drank together, he laughed, winked, then got immensely calm. Still smiling, though, he looked suddenly, beautifully young.

“Anna,” he whispered intensely, leaning forward, “guess what? I’m flying to China tomorrow! Then India! Then London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City!”

“You are, Roger?”

“I am,” he said. “I, I, I, not we, we, we, but I, Roger Bidwell Harrison, I, I, I!”

I stared at him and he gazed quietly back at me, and I must have gasped. For then I knew what he had finally done tonight, this hour, within the last few minutes.

Oh, no, my lips must have murmured.

Oh, but yes, yes, his eyes upon me replied, incredible miracle of miracles, after all these waiting years. Tonight at last. Tonight.