The Longest Night (43 page)

P
aul was leaving the army. He'd decided it all at once, while Esrom was still at the cabin with the girls. Paul had just walked into the living room where Nat was sitting and said, “I think I need to get out.”

She'd nodded, not questioning; for him to come to this decision was no small thing. She knew he had been grappling with it since the accident. He would take whatever discharge they gave him, but because of his role during the accident, he'd been told they would go easy. “What will you do instead?” she asked.

There were new power plants opening all over the country, he said, being approved every day; the nation was wild for nuclear energy, but the army program was slowing down. The CR-1, everyone was whispering, had been its death knell. Paul called the office at the brand-new civilian plant in Illinois, and was surprised by the eagerness of the supervisor there. So few people had real nuclear training that he'd been offered a job at well above his current salary. He'd proposed to Nat that they head east now, first to Michigan to pay their respects to Webb's mother and attend his funeral (which had been delayed because of the investigation and the decontamination of his remains); then they would drive to Illinois, poke around the town of Morris, where the Dresden nuclear plant was, and find a place to live.

For a moment Nat felt a pang: It would be strange to leave the army, despite her mixed feelings toward it; she liked their house; she was just getting used to Idaho Falls; most of all, of course, there was Esrom. Guilty little thoughts had slipped through her mind in previous days, oddly focused fantasies where she would occasionally bump into him in their small town (for if they stayed another year to finish out Paul's tour, surely she'd encounter Esrom from time to time) and the happiness she would feel, seeing him. Sometimes she allowed herself to consider standing outside his apartment, waiting for him to come out, and surprising him. The sudden jump of joy on his face would be something rare, something you didn't get from everyone. It seemed a waste to squander it and yet it was a thing you couldn't put back, either, once you picked it up.

If she couldn't stop such thoughts even after all that had happened, the hard truth was that she'd need to get herself away from Esrom entirely. She would just have to shut that door in her brain. It could close but maybe not latch, and when they left this town it would slowly rust over.

T
HE ARMY MOVERS CAME
and packed up their things. Moving was always a two-day process: one day to pack up, sleeping that night among the boxes; the second day for the movers to load everything onto the truck. They would sleep one last night in the house before leaving for Michigan early the next morning.

And so, suddenly, the little house was empty again. It was painful how cute a house looked right before you moved; Nat glanced around and thought,
I'd really like to live here,
as if she never had.

Two days before they left, on her way home from getting a few items downtown, Nat spotted Jeannie Richards climbing off the city bus at the neighborhood stop. Jeannie was bundled in ankle-length fur with a matching hat, her high heels punching through snow; only she could make public transportation look so good.

Nat's first impulse was to try to avoid her, to stop the car (a used Chevy station wagon Paul had picked up for cheap because, after the accident, the Fireflite had to be destroyed). She could wait until Jeannie was out of sight, or make a U-turn, but either move would have been obvious. Besides, what did she have to lose now?

So she pulled over and rolled down her window. “May I give you a ride?” she asked.

Jeannie paused, hugging her coat around herself. Her red hair was bright against the gray snow and sky. “It's only two blocks,” she said.

Nat pushed open the passenger door. “Please, hop in.” She lifted Sadie's Moses basket around to the floor of the backseat; Sadie was sound asleep. “Try not to wake her, girls,” she whispered to Sam and Liddie, moving their feet gently aside to make room for the baby.

Jeannie climbed in, lighting herself a cigarette. “Thank you,” she said.

“Do you have any Cracker Jack?” Sam asked.

Nat turned, her finger to her lips. Good grief: Sam practically shook the woman down for Cracker Jack the moment she got in the car. She'd never forgotten it from that dinner party with the nannies.

“How is Angela?” Nat asked.

“She's good,” Jeannie said, managing a quick smile. “They put her in warm water at the hospital and her color came right back. She was drinking broth half an hour later. The doctor said to look out for a cough, but she never got one.”

“Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,” Nat said. “I was worried about her. I'm sorry that she ever got…involved.”

Jeannie paused. “We were lucky,” she finally said, her eyes flashing to Nat. “Both of us.”

They drove a few more moments, and neither woman said anything. What Nat wanted to ask Jeannie, more than anything, was why she'd put the page from the logbook in her mailbox. It was an action that might have been selfless, but altruism seemed out of character for Jeannie Richards. The question was nearly popping off Nat's tongue and yet she found it hard to get started.

“May I ask you a question?” she finally said.

Jeannie glanced at her warily. “Go ahead.”

“Why did you put that paper in our mailbox?”

Jeannie paused. She gazed out the windshield, holding her cigarette at her shoulder, and eventually exhaled. “I was worried that Mitch was going to get himself into even more trouble,” she said. “Removing pages from the logbook. Fixing documents, even. I thought maybe if Collier, if your husband found out—well, we both know his conscience would have eaten him alive. He'd have done something about it. I hoped he could stop my husband before it got too far. I put it in your box the day of the restart, but the accident happened that night, so I guess I was too late.”

“You were kind of setting Paul up,” Nat said, processing all of this. “Because you knew he would have taken action.”

“I suppose so, yes. He's the only one who ever did.”

Nat felt a little proud and sad at the same time. “I'm sorry about the car,” she finally said.

Jeannie shrugged. “It was my husband's car. It had a rather poetic end. He'd probably prefer to see it go that way than to just be handed over to me in the divorce.”

Nat froze.

“Don't look shocked,” Jeannie said. “My goodness, you virginal young thing. It's legal now. I'm flying out to Reno on Thursday. Haven't you heard of the Reno Cure?”

“I have,” Nat said, glancing back at the girls in her rearview mirror.

“Six weeks to establish residency and the divorce is yours, no matter the reason. I was going to do it here, but it was so much trickier. You had to establish wrongdoing; you needed hard proof. In Reno it's practically no-fault.”

“Wow,” said Nat.

“Mitch is being discharged.” She scratched her head delicately with one finger, lowering her voice as if this were the word she didn't want the girls in the backseat to hear, the one they risked repeating rather than the two hatchet-blade syllables of
divorce
. “I thought he might get a general discharge but, mercifully, they made it honorable. Obviously they didn't know everything he was up to. Three years shy of his retirement, though—he won't get his pension. Isn't it a laugh to think of me hanging on all those years for a retirement that would never come?”

“But what will you do?”

“My brother still works at Boeing in St. Louis. They need secretaries, dispatchers. I talked to him last night and he said he could get me work. So Angela and I will drive out there eventually. Mitch plans to live nearby so he can see her when he likes.”

“My goodness. You're so brave,” Nat said, amazed.

“Well. Sometimes we have to be brave, right?” Jeannie turned to Nat and actually smiled. Then she opened her door, the fur of her coat slithering from the seat as she stood. Perfectly erect, her copper hair lifted by the breeze, she made her way up the snowy drive.

ELVIRA, MICHIGAN

T
he small funeral party huddled at the edge of the cemetery, far from the sweep of gray headstones, in an unmarked spread of snow-covered ground. They were gathered around a wheeled crane that idled, blowing puffs of smoke into the air, and their gaze followed its gently quivering chain into a deep rectangular hole. At its bottom was a huge lead-lined casket weighing hundreds of pounds, looped by the chain.

Nat shifted Sadie in her arms, peeled black the blanket to peek in at her sleeping face, and then covered her again. Paul held Liddie, and Sam stood between them, solemn, red-nosed, and probably bored beneath her small fur hat.

There was a grind and a creak as the casket was pulled, slowly, to the top of the grave where it had been placed a few hours before; Webb's mother had requested it be lifted for the service. The two men from the Atomic Energy Commission who'd been sent to oversee the ceremony said the casket could be lifted for only five minutes because Webb's body was still emitting radiation. The rattling chain interested Sam, who peered forward on tiptoe.

Nat tried not to think about what Paul had said, through gritted teeth, one night soon after the accident (when he'd read yet another newspaper article speculating that Webb or Sidorski had purposefully lifted the rod too high on some sort of suicide mission): that they'd had to cut the most radioactive parts of Webb's body away, including his head and hands, and bury these separately in the hot waste site in Idaho Falls. As soon as he'd said it he'd looked to Nat and apologized with horrified eyes
. You didn't need to know that. I'm so sorry
. Nat had simply put her arm around him. She was grateful that he was not allowed back to the testing station to witness all these proceedings firsthand, that he only heard reports back from Franks. But it was hard, now, to press her mind away from the knowledge of what was actually in the casket—not the peaceful, handsome young man they were all trying to remember. She prayed to God that his mother didn't know.

“Can we cut the engine?” asked the priest, looking toward the crane. He motioned to the driver, trying not to shout, and made a slicing motion across his chest. “Let's cut that engine, hm?” When it finally silenced he smiled closed-lipped at the group of congregants and whispered, as if they had turned it off themselves, “Thank you.”

Sam started to whine about something. Nat reached down to take her hand.

The priest read a Bible passage, his nasal, upper Midwest accent surprising Nat each time she heard it afresh. It sounded like a funny voice from the radio, someone who was supposed to be a grocery-store gossip or a nosy neighbor. Further throwing Nat off was that Webb's first name had been Johnny; every time someone mentioned Johnny she had to force the image of Webb's smiling face into her mind to keep from feeling disoriented. Paul said he'd been aware of Webb's name but then forgotten it because he'd never heard it said aloud.

Next to the priest Webb's mother stood, swaying slightly, her eyes closed. She was a slight, short-haired woman, no older than forty, her skin pitted here and there in gentle divots, soft folds of skin pouching her eyes.

“Being perfected in a short time,” the priest was saying, “Johnny Webb fulfilled long years, for his soul was already pleasing to the Lord.”

Sam raised one foot, shook it, set it down, and did the same with the other; her Mary Janes were too small and her toes must have been freezing. Nat squeezed her hand and jiggled it encouragingly.

It was time for Paul to read. He took a step forward; he'd already removed his gloves and he held a small handwritten piece of paper that bent damply in the moist, snow-flecked air. Mrs. Webb had asked him to choose a verse from a list the priest had given. Never in her life had Nat seen Paul read anything aloud, let alone a Bible verse, and it gave her the odd impression of watching a handsome, spiritual stranger. He shook the paper gently to stiffen it.

“Gracious is the Lord, and righteous,” he read, stammering slightly as he found his rhythm. “Our God is merciful.” He looked briefly at Mrs. Webb as if to make sure she was all right, and read on. “I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted'; I said in my consternation, ‘Everyone is a liar.' ”

In her blanket, Sadie made a snuffly cry, and Nat bobbed her, watching Paul. “O Lord,” he finished, “you have loosed my bonds.”

Mrs. Webb opened her eyes and smiled at him, and then she closed them again.

The priest read two more passages and led them with a honky, rhinal singsong through the twenty-third Psalm. Then he stepped back, and the instant he did so the two Atomic Energy agents, in suits and dark ankle-length coats, came forward from the edges of the group. They signaled to the driver of the crane, who snapped to attention and rumbled his machine to a smoky start-up. Webb's body in its layers of shielding swung softly to the bottom of the grave, and his mother knelt to scrape a handful of snowy dirt into her glove and toss it on top.

At this the suited men extended their arms, quietly sweeping the congregants forward. “This way, please,” whispered the man closest to Nat. “Let's move across the field now.” He turned back to wave in a cement truck parked out by the fence; it would quickly seal the coffin under eight feet of concrete.

The priest turned Mrs. Webb by the shoulders and walked her back the way they'd come, trampling their own overlapping footsteps through the snow.

“We made it,” said one of the two men, looking at his watch. “Good work.” They followed the gathering back to where the rows of regular headstones began and then stopped to make sure that no one, from reasons of sentimentality, curiosity, or absentmindedness, doubled back.

T
HE SMALL HOUSE SMELLED
of coffee and dusty carpeting and old brocade drapes. Sharon Webb set cup after cup of shaking black liquid on the low table, refilling them the second they were drained, telling Nat and Paul she didn't mind at all. She brought out a plate of cookies and a bowl of potato chips and some crackers with pub cheese. Sam and Liddie watched television nearby, their feet swinging merrily from the floor up to their sprawled bottoms and back again as they kicked the orange rug, dug their toes into it, kicked again. Occasionally they lurched up to grab a handful of chips and then they flopped back down.

“It was so good of you to come,” Sharon said, in her Michigander's inflection: “so” tucked into itself and shortened, “come” stretched out into a soft “a.” “Johnny mentioned you. He said there was one of the boys on shift he really got along with, that you were like an older brother to him.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Paul said.

“It was a lovely service,” said Nat.

“A bit quick, though,” said Mrs. Webb, her mouth pursed. She sighed. “I suppose I should sit down. Can't keep bustling about forever. I should probably put my feet up.”

She finally settled onto the couch next to Nat, lit a cigarette, and watched them eat. Nat ate and ate, trying to show her appreciation. Then she worried that Mrs. Webb would get up again to replenish things, so she slowed down, nibbling a cracker, rocking the sleeping Sadie, looking around at the pictures on the wall: a couple of old paintings of flowers in vases and children sitting by white fences, a few family photos, a soft-focus profile of Jesus with blushed cheeks. Mrs. Webb began to reminisce, which Nat knew was healthy and useful, so she was glad to listen. She heard about Johnny Webb tussling with a much older boy in the front yard; Johnny, dared to eat a worm at three years old and doing it; Johnny, seeing a small brown dog limping by the side of the road in the eighth grade and climbing right off the school bus at a stop sign, luring the dog over with a peanut butter sandwich, bringing it home and naming it Freddie. Freddie still lived in the house, panting cheerfully on his side just a few feet away beneath the swell of a large fatty tumor.

“There was a fellow I dated awhile, when Johnny was eleven,” Sharon said, exhaling smoke, flicking her middle finger against a hangnail on one thumb. She paused to nip off the strand of skin. “He had a little daughter, nine or ten. She and Johnny got real close. He wanted her for a sister bad, he hated being an only child, and when the fellow and I stopped seeing each other Johnny was so mad at me he hid in his room for days.”

“Aw,” said Nat, not sure what else to say.

“You've heard what people are saying, haven't you?” Sharon said. Her face hardened suddenly and she looked to Paul for reassurance. “That the explosion wasn't an accident, but it was caused on purpose?”

“That's rubbish,” Paul said. “Don't believe a word of it.”

Nat's gaze darted to Paul uneasily. Nothing made him angrier than these rumors, which were being reported in the papers with such persistence that people were taking them for true. The press latched on to Webb's recent breakup with his girlfriend to suggest that he'd knowingly pulled the stuck rod well above its limit. Others intimated that there'd been a love triangle at play, with two of the operators fighting over the same woman. The gossip drove Paul to distraction. “It's cruel,” he'd said, back in Idaho Falls. “They're slandering his name. I need to get away from this goddamn town.”

Sharon looked down at her hands and then back up again, her eyes glittering. “If it's not true, why's everyone saying it?”

“People don't want to believe that the reactor itself failed,” Paul said. “That's what I think. Because if that's true, then nuclear power isn't as safe as we thought. But if folks can tell themselves it was just one crazy guy—I'm sorry, Mrs. Webb, you know I don't feel that way—then they can tell themselves it was a freak thing, human error, and that the machine was sound.”

Sharon's eyes filled with tears, and Nat reached over to squeeze her hand. “Do
you
think it could have been prevented?” Sharon asked.

Paul looked pained. “I don't know for sure, Mrs. Webb. But I know that your son didn't do anything wrong. He would never hurt anybody else. And I will tell that to any person who ever brings it up.”

She nodded and wiped her eyes. “Thank you.”

Paul shook a small brown paper bag out of his duffel and handed it to her. “Here are the things from his locker. I'm sure he'd want you to have them.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Webb said. “How thoughtful.” She fished out a photo of herself on the front steps of the house in a checkered apron, her hair tied up with a top-knotted scarf. “Oh, look at me,” she said, “I look so young.”

Sharon insisted that the Colliers stay the night; she wouldn't dream of sending them off to a motel. Nat felt they were too many people for the small, close house—it had only two bedrooms, and she wouldn't have felt right about sleeping in Webb's childhood room, which still held his baseball glove and Matchbox cars—but she and Paul didn't want to be ungrateful, and besides it didn't hurt to save the money. So after a dinner of lasagna a neighbor had left on the front step, Sharon brought out armfuls of blankets from some secret, blanket-stuffed closet, heaping them onto the floor: quilts and afghans and an old one of Webb's with baseball players all over it. Nat got the girls settled on the floor, telling them that of course these blankets were different from theirs at home and of course they would still sleep fine, and please don't repeat that the blankets are dusty, and in the morning they would be on their way south from Michigan to Illinois. Her mind flickered back to their early days in Idaho and she felt a stab of nostalgia. She remembered that summer night air, the toads trilling outside, the girls asleep on the floor of their then-new house and she and Paul on the back patio. It seemed a lifetime ago, like the days before the fall, when people were innocent and did such things.

With the lights dim and Paul dozing beside the girls on the floor, Nat sat up, giving Sadie her bottle. She loved these moments alone with the baby, no other demands. She could concentrate on Sadie's small moving fingers, the hearty suck and swallow, the way her dark eyes wandered the room alertly while she drank. Once the milk was done she would sag with sleepiness, but during her bottle she was fascinating to watch, tiny and observant, as if memorizing the angles of doorjambs and the tilt of curtain rods.