Black Diamond Page 18

  She mailed the letters as soon as she landed. Bruce answered quickly: he must have written the moment he got the letter. Don’t worry about losing me, he told her. Of course I love you back. I’ll go see Dad when all this business is finished and then I’ll come see you. He’d crossed out a sentence that had begun Maybe we can, and another that had started out, As soon as I’m free of, and below that he’d just written the word ‘love’, and signed his name.

  *

  We can shape history to a certain extent. The course of it follows a pattern of the human mind – or, maybe it’s just that we think it does because that’s how we interpret events.

  Even though some causes or ideals seem wrong to us, as far as history is concerned, the right one is the one that wins. Victory is only for a while, anyway. Everything could all come back: the Dark Ages, the wars for a hundred years. If you’ve got a chance of winning, isn’t it better to fight for a hundred years, rather than go under?

  *

  Rose was careful not to ask Alma too many direct questions. She asked around the edges: was there someone to look after Alma’s father, would she need to take a break to go home again fairly soon, could any of them do anything? No, Alma answered; everything was fine. The two boys, Jerry and Toby, broke the ice: they wanted to hear all about the bus crash. They wanted to see Alma’s cut, which had almost healed. Their interest in the scope of the death and mutilations was intense and ghoulish. She was amused, but she told them something of what it had really been like. She didn’t include too many details; despite his pleading for gory incident, Toby still had nightmares after seeing monster movies.

  Alma thought that she was getting over it; that she was easing herself back into a routine again. But one afternoon in the library, when the two of them were alone at the desk, Rose said something about a mother being a real mother even if, as Alma had told her, she was adopted; and Alma began to cry.

  ‘That’s just it,’ she sobbed. ‘He didn’t come. He wouldn’t even come to her funeral. He wanted us to make this pact a long time ago: about how we’d go to the adoption agency to find out about our real parents and then we’d hunt them down. He wanted to get back at them some way. But I never felt like that. I figured it was better to forget everything and just think how lucky we were to be here at all and have a good mother and father: even if we were adopted and they weren’t the real ones. He wouldn’t even come to her funeral. She was the only mother we had all our lives. And she loved us, even though she wasn’t my real mother.’ She stopped, to catch her breath. She wiped her hands across her face. Rose put her arm around her and patted her back.

  Alma got out a kleenex. She blew her nose. She took a deep breath. ‘You’re my real mother,’ she said. ‘That’s why I came out here. That’s why I got this job. I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Rose said. ‘My goodness.’ She looked at Alma as if trying to recognize someone who was standing a long way off. ‘Oh,’ she said again. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Alma steered her into a chair. ‘Let me go get you a glass of water,’ she said. But Rose caught hold of her hand and wouldn’t release it. Alma pulled up a second chair. She sat down. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ she said. ‘I thought it might upset you. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘It’s my dream come true. I’ve just been thinking about you for too long. My little girl. Do you have another one of those kleenexes? I’ve thought about this moment so many times.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Alma said. She pulled a kleenex out of her pocket and handed it to Rose.

  *

  History is only what other people say about you after you’re dead, or – if you’re lucky – what you get to say about yourself, as long as you’re holding the reins. None of it matters at the time, only afterwards.

  *

  Over the next few days Rose began to tell Alma about her own parents, about her highschool boyfriend and his family: they all still lived in the same town; she’d even seen him again. For a long time she’d hated him, but she’d come to realize that he’d just been young, as she had been. He had a family himself now and she felt nothing against him, or for him. She still couldn’t forgive her parents. That was another reason why Tom and the boys meant so much to her. Tom knew the whole story; she’d told him before they were married.

  Alma asked all the questions she’d been storing up for years.

  ‘Right at the beginning,’ Rose said, ‘I was horrified. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I wanted so much for it not to be true. I thought of getting rid of it, I really did. If I’d known a little more, I’m sure I would have. But I didn’t know what to do. I told him and he told his parents, and they told mine, and they all got together. I still feel bitter about that, to this day. That’s why I don’t have much to do with my family any more. They were trying to do their best for me. They said so. I’ve just never been able to believe that again, not completely. Maybe they wanted to think that was true at the time. It’s hard to face the disapproval of a whole town. I wouldn’t want to, myself. But if it was a question of my child’s future or the town’s opinion, I’d get up and go. If I could. I guess it was my father who decided that they couldn’t. Anyway, I’m sorry I never met your mother. I could have. When it was getting near the time of the birth, I wanted to. And the agency said it would be all right. But my parents wouldn’t allow it. They were afraid of it coming back on them later in some way.’

  ‘I wish you’d met her,’ Alma said.

  ‘So do I. I really do. But you can tell me about her. Did she name you after a relative in her family?’

  ‘Yes. One of her grandmothers.’

  ‘It’s strange to think of you being called Alma. I never knew anybody named Alma.’

  ‘You had another name for me.’

  ‘Yes. It was –’

  ‘Don’t tell me what it was. Please. I’m the way I am now. I can’t be somebody else.’

  ‘No, of course. You’re right.’

  ‘You could meet my father.’

  ‘If he’d like to.’

  ‘Good. I’ll talk to him about it.’

  They went for a long walk together late one afternoon while the boys were playing over at a neighbor’s house. Alma said, ‘I think it’s inhuman that they never let you see me.’

  ‘It wasn’t the society’s policy in those days. Maybe it still isn’t. They didn’t want the mothers to change their minds. They thought it was better to knock you out in the delivery room and then you’d come to, and all the problems would be over. Everyone was very nice to me. They made me feel as if they thought that there had been a mistake, but it wasn’t my fault, and that if I went along with all their advice, I’d be proving how sensible I was; how much character I had. They hardly mentioned the baby once. They just kept saying that there was nothing to worry about. They did tell me it was a girl, that’s all. One of the nurses told me; I don’t think she was supposed to: she let it slip. You know, while I was carrying you, before I even knew if I was going to have a girl or a boy – I was so mixed up about everything. Sometimes I hated it. Sometimes I had this feeling of hope, of buoyancy – I didn’t know what it was: like happiness. It was only later, about ten days after the birth, that I knew how much I loved you. I tried everything to get you back. They told me I’d change. They said it was part of the reaction and I’d get over it. But I didn’t. I got worse. I was desperate. They gave me pills and they told me that I had to think about the future: I should ask myself if I wanted it to go down on my record that I was unstable. I might never be able to get a job. So I gave up writing the letters and making the phone calls. I think my mother started to have a bad conscience about me then. But it was too late. I felt that something had been done to me that could never be put right, ever.’

  ‘And now I’m here,’ Alma said.

  ‘All grown up.’

  ‘We’ll settle down with it. We like each other already, so it’ll be all right.’

  ‘What if you hadn’t liked me?’


  ‘I don’t know,’ Alma said. ‘I think I’d just have moved on in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘It frightens me to think of it.’

  ‘I bet it happens. There must be a lot of kids who get a summer job someplace, to look at their parents, and that’s all they want to do, whether they like them or not: they just take that one look and go away. That’s what Bruce should do.’

  ‘Tell me some more about him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin. I hope you’ll meet him, too, some day. Then you can see for yourself.’

  ‘It’s hard to describe people.’

  ‘It gets harder, the closer you are to them.’

  ‘I’ve got some pictures from my highschool days. Everything’s in a box. I haven’t opened it since the adoption. I used to think about throwing it all away, but I never did. There’s a photograph of Jim. Do you know something: when we were at school, he was a very good athlete but what he was really wonderful at was – he was the most beautiful dancer you ever saw. I guess that’s something you inherited from him.’

  Alma thought about a teenage boy, a marvelous dancer and younger than she was now. He was no longer anonymous. Something that was hers had once belonged to him, too. There was a way in which he and she were the same. Now that she knew, she couldn’t forget it. She saw a time coming when curiosity would draw her to the place where he lived, not to meet him but just to catch sight of him for an instant.

  At the moment, she didn’t want to. From having no relatives, she’d gone to having too many. They were beginning to confuse her. She needed to sit down for a long talk with Bruce.

  * * *

  Joanna telephoned him early in the morning. The call came through on his second phone. He’d decided only the day before that he’d give her a ring himself that afternoon.

  She said that she was afraid he’d been right about those laurel bushes, and most of the other things in the garden as well: could he come over tomorrow afternoon and talk about it? The girls would both be away on the school glee club weekend. And her husband was going to be looking over somebody’s horses all day long. ‘So, we’ll have plenty of time to talk,’ she told him. ‘About the garden.’ Her voice sounded low and purring, as if she’d be smiling. He said: Sure, he’d see her around two-thirty.

  That night he went to a movie theater and sat through a double feature. One film was a low-budget light comedy about insurance fraud investigators; it starred a TV actress he liked. The second told the story of a city cop who tried to buck the system, was thrown out of the force and ended up saving the whole of New York single-handed, after shooting thirty-six people.

  When he got home he wasn’t sleepy. He took a walk.

  Back in his highschool years he used to enjoy walking around alone at night in the late spring and early summer; he’d be feeling restless and he’d start out fairly fast, but as the light went he’d calm down until he was moving lazily from street to street, the trees around him growing massive and shaggy with darkness. He used to love walking all through the night. That was another town of white picket fences and neat lawns. At one time he’d detested everything about it. Now he thought of it with the longing of homesickness, and of his youth and childhood that were over forever.

  He walked for hours. He tried not to think ahead, not to plan; just to walk from one shadow to the next.

  *

  He got the afternoon off by doing a deal with a man at work. He’d arranged it the day before, so he had nothing hanging over him. Everything was going smoothly.

  He took his time getting to the house, parked, and sat in the car for a while. The trees were only just beginning to turn. The blue sky had a few bright, puffy clouds in it; the air was mild and stirred by the constant movement of small breezes. He wanted to relax into the beauty of what he was looking at, but instead of giving him rest, the loveliness of the day excited him. Everything he looked at seemed invested with immense significance. He wondered if the strange heightening of emotion – apparent in the world outside as well as within him – meant that he was going to end up killing her.

  When he tried to think ahead, it was as if he’d gone blind: as if his mind had entered a kind of night. Things distant and near were equally incomprehensible to him, as were the past and the future, the home that was gone and the one that had never been. He thought that he might have come to the end of his life. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He seemed to have forgotten his way.

  He knew that the solution to everything would come to him at the right moment, but he ought to have had a plan. What he’d imagined at the beginning was that he’d start with the two daughters. But they’d been too experienced to be damaged, too shallow to be hurt. All he’d done was to prove that they were worthless, and he’d already known that. They had cheated him of his revenge. They were fighting and full of spite against each other, but that wasn’t enough. He had to do something to Joanna herself. Maybe he could cause a break between her and her husband. Or – more than that; he might be able to persuade her to run away with him. That would be best of all.

  This was the day for it: the culmination. Everything was going to work. Maybe he still didn’t know how, but that wasn’t important.

  He got out of the car and walked down the street to the house. She opened the door before he had a chance to ring the bell. She had a glass in her hand. She smiled as if posing for a photograph, and said, ‘Hi. Come on in. Have a drink.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  She swished away in front of him, across the hall, down two steps, over the living-room rug and to the screened-in porch that looked out on to the garden.

  The sliding glass doors were closed; no one would be able to hear them from across the lawn. And the slatted bamboo blinds were drawn on two sides: without a good pair of field glasses, nobody could see them, either. She’d set everything up. All he had to do was to let her fall into it.

  She was wearing a silky, wrap-around dress that had appeared to be flowing like water while she walked. Now that she was stretched out on one of the sofas, the material pulled tight so that he could see the lines of a tiny pair of bikini pants underneath and, above the belt at her waist, the shape of her breasts and nipples almost as exactly as if she’d been naked.

  ‘What can I offer you?’ she said, in the same voice she’d used over the telephone.

  Right, he thought. I’ll make you work for it. ‘How about a gin and tonic to start with?’

  She got up, mixed him a drink, bent over his chair to hand it to him, dumped some more bourbon into her own glass and repositioned herself on the sofa. She’d made sure that he’d been able to see down her dress. This wasn’t going to be the day to examine the shrubs for mildew and leaf rot.

  She said, ‘Why don’t you bring that erection over here and let it say hello?’

  ‘I might,’ he said. He lifted his glass and swirled the ice cubes around. ‘Why don’t you tell me something about yourself first?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, your unspoiled girlhood, how you ended up with a man who’s got a jail record – that kind of thing.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘If you work on a paper, you’ve got access to a lot of information. I was curious about you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My two girls are both crazy about you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I guess you think you know a lot about girls.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And you know about men. So that makes us even.’

  She moved her leg. Her dress fell open at the side, showing her thigh nearly up to the hipbone.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said. ‘Where did you grow up?’

  ‘In a small town. Full of small people with small minds.’ She drained her glass and banged it down on the table next to her.

  ‘A lot of them live in big towns too, and in the suburbs.’

  ‘But you can get away from them easier there. This town
I grew up in – if you were seen talking with somebody on the way home from school, five people would have mentioned it to your mother before you got in the door. That’s how I met Ray. He was working on the road. I was on my way to the bus stop. Nobody else used to walk that route; all the girls in my grade were like their mothers – they’d disassociated themselves from me because I’d been out with a boy in the senior class who had a bad reputation. They were all saying I’d been sleeping with him, which I had, of course. You bet your boots. And didn’t they wish they had, too. He was the real McCoy, all right. He had what it takes.’ She reached for her glass, tried to drink from it and realized that it was empty.

  Bruce stood up and took the glass from her. He poured her a drink of water with a fistful of ice cubes in it. As he put some more tonic into his own glass, he said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sure. I thought he was pretty cute. He’s gotten a little beefy now, but you should have seen him when he was twenty-five – Jesus. A little like you, matter of fact, but darker. It was early spring. We had a freak heat-wave. He’d be there with his shirt off and they’d call things out to me – not the usual dirty stuff: jokes, to make me laugh. It was mainly him. I got to doing it back, just for fun.’

  He gave her the drink of water, pulled his chair nearer and sat down again. He didn’t want to get too drunk to see the right moment when it came. He wanted the news of who he was to be devastating. She was pretending to be drunker than she was; she’d be able to take it in when he told her. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Then one day he waited around the corner for me. Asked me out. So I said yes, and from then on we were just screwing each other to death. You can’t imagine what he was like. Me, too. I needed it all the time. When you’re that age, it’s like being insane. All the time.’