“I’m not sure.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Then he did something I didn’t expect. He patted me on the shoulder. A minute later he was driving away. I looked at the sky. It wasn’t blue at all. It was streaked with rain clouds that resembled dirty rags, the wind filled with dust and desiccated animal manure blowing from the pasture at the end of our street. Drops of water were evaporating on the sidewalk, the air blooming with an odor like fish spawn and stagnant mud and carrion and waste buckets poured in a privy, as though the mystical cycle of creation had been preempted and replaced with a universe at war with itself. I thought I was losing my mind.
I NEEDED TO TALK to Valerie. A thunderstorm had just burst over the city when I drove into the Heights. The rain was blinding, the palm trees on the boulevard thrashing, lightning crashing in the park. On the main boulevard, the drains were plugged with floating trash, and rainwater had already backed over the curbs and sidewalks into people’s yards. The explosions of thunder were deafening. Out in the park a solitary figure splashed through the puddles, bent forward into the wind, a clutch of books held against her breast.
I recognized her from afar as I would have in a crowd the size of China. No one else had auburn hair with gold streaks in it; no one else wore pink tennis shoes without socks and white shorts printed with flowers and a baseball cap and a shirt like cheesecloth with lace sewn on it; no one else would try to cross a softball diamond in the midst of an electric storm while hugging library books to her chest to keep them dry rather than cover her head with them.
I shifted down and pulled onto the swale and drove across the sidewalk into the park, my tires unable to find purchase, spinning water and mud and divots of grass into the air. I left the engine running and the door open and sprinted through the rain, slipping and almost falling. I could see her squinting at me through the rain, the sky black and unmerciful overhead.
I took the books from her hands and grabbed her arm and started running for the car. She tripped and fell, and I picked her up around the waist and held her against me, my arm tight around her ribs. When we reached the car, I pushed her across the seat and jumped in after her and slammed the door, both of us breathless, books spilling on the floor.
“Where did you come from?” she said.
“Home.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Who else would be out in an electric storm in the middle of a field?”
She moved the strings of wet hair from her eyes and stared into my face. She smiled. Slowly at first. Then she looked through the windshield as we worked our way out of the park.
SHE GAVE ME two bath towels so I could dry off in the living room while she changed clothes upstairs. Then she went into the kitchen and got a bowl of potato salad and cold fried chicken out of the icebox. I couldn’t eat, not until I unloaded the nest of fish hooks in my head and the guilt that lived like weevil worms in my heart. “Grady Harrelson said some ugly things about you at the Copacabana.”
“What things?”
“Personal things about y’all being together.”
“Be specific, Aaron.”
“About making love with you.”
“He said he slept with me?”
I looked out the window at the raindrops sliding like quicksilver off the banana fronds, my eyes empty. “He went into detail. I hit him.”
“Whatever he told you, he made up,” she said.
“You didn’t sleep—”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“He claimed you told him we’d broken up.”
“Grady calls every day, no matter how many times I hang up. The other day he asked where you were. I told him I didn’t know because I wasn’t seeing either one of you. I’m sorry I said that.”
She waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.
“You’re still worried I wasn’t a virgin when we met?” she said.
“No, I don’t care about that at all.”
“The boy was a senior and I was a sophomore. We were going to be married. At least that was what we told ourselves. His reserve unit was called up just after his graduation. He was killed at Heartbreak Ridge.”
“I’m sorry, Valerie. I didn’t know any of that.”
“I’m all right now. I wasn’t for a long time.”