“This is better,” she says.
______
They move into the backseat to avoid the steering wheel. Outside, it is winter still, but inside it is all steam and hot breath. A kind of cocoon, the world opaque.
Linda has thought the ache of pleasure was all there was. It seemed to be enough: the kissing and the touching and the mysterious wetness she would take back with her to the triple-decker. But that afternoon, in the car, she understands finally what the ache is all about: how the body strains and bursts, showering itself.
They lie on the backseat, their legs twisted and bent to accommodate their length. She, with him on top of her, is warm, but he now feels the chill and reaches into the front seat and slips his overcoat over his back.
He smooths her hair from her face. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Everything is new,” she says. “Everything.”
______
“We’ll always be together,” Thomas says.
“Yes.”
“Nothing can separate us.”
“No.”
“Did you like that? Making love?”
“I loved it.”
“You weren’t afraid?”
“A little.”
______
Thomas retrieves the bottle of scotch from the front seat and lifts his torso so that he can take a sip. “Do you want some now?” he asks.
If she hesitates, it is only for a second, two at best. “What is it?”
“Scotch.”
The drink burns as it is going down, and she can feel almost immediately the heat in her stomach. She takes another drink and passes the bottle back to Thomas. After a time, she leans her head back down. The drink hits her, spins her out of the Skylark, and sets her afloat.
“Did it upset you?” she asks.
“What?”
“My not being . . . you know.” She can’t say the word.
“A virgin?”
“Yes,” she says, relieved.
“No,” he says.
______
“Something happens to you, it doesn’t have to change your life for good,” he says.
“This has changed my life for good,” she says.
______
They dress awkwardly in the backseat. When they are done, they each leave the car to get into the front seat
—
another comedy routine. “We’ll have children,” he says, startling her.
“You think so?”
“I really like Jack,” he says.
“OK,” she agrees.
“How many do you think?” Thomas asks.
“I don’t know. Three or four?”
“I was thinking seven or eight.”
“Thomas.”
He hunches over the steering wheel. “Run your nails down my back?” he asks.
“Like this?”
“All over.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah,” he says, sighing. “That’s great.”
______
“I feel so lucky,” she says. “So fantastically lucky.”
“To have met, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a goddamn miracle,” he says.
______
“I have to ask you this,” he says as they are once again driving on the coastal route. And perhaps he is driving a bit faster than before
—
a bit too fast, maybe.
“OK,” she says.
“Why did you let it happen?”
She closes her eyes briefly and thinks. She knows that she must try to answer this. “I don’t know,” she begins. “I was always the odd one out . . .” She interrupts herself. “This isn’t an excuse, you understand. It’s just an explanation.”
“I understand.”
“With my aunt and cousins, even the ones who treated me well, I was always an outsider. I suppose you could say it was like being nice to a servant. But he was different. It’s pathetic to admit to this, but he made me feel special. He always had treats for me.”
She stopped, hearing herself. It was
absolutely
pathetic. “I think in the beginning he felt sorry for me and was trying to compensate in his way. He’d take me to a movie or let me go with him when he did errands in town.”
“Did he do it to Eileen?”
“I used to think not. But now I’m not so sure.” She considers his original question. “The truest answer I can give you is that I did it for the attention. I craved attention then. I suppose I still do.”
“Everybody does,” he says.
______
Thomas turns the radio up, something he rarely does. He sings, badly and loudly, and she can’t help but smile. She sits back against the seat. She can’t believe her luck. She has Thomas and a future now
—
years of possibilities. The sun sets abruptly, rolling shadows up the sides of houses. The temperature drops, and she reaches for her coat.
“I love you,” she says as they round a sharp corner.
And this is true. She knows that she will love him all her life.
A small child, a girl, perhaps five or six years old, sits on a tricycle in the middle of the road. She takes in the approaching Skylark, lifts the tricycle to her waist, and runs with its weight to the side of the road.
It is a fleeting scene, a tableau, and slightly comical. The O of surprise on the girl’s face, the commonsensical decision to carry the tricycle, the run-waddle to safety. And if Linda and Thomas had continued on, they’d have been at first horrified and then tickled by the scene, the scotch turning laughter into giggles.
But they do not continue on.
Thomas brakes and swerves to avoid the girl. Linda screams as a telephone pole and a tree fill the windshield. Thomas jerks the wheel, the car skids across the narrow road, and a rear tire catches in a ditch.
It happens that fast.
In the seconds they are airborne
—
in these, the last seconds of Linda’s life
—
she sees not the past, the life that supposedly flashes before one’s eyes, but the future: not the life she has lived, but the life she might have had.
A cottage in a field of chrysanthemums in a country far away.
A small boy she holds on her lap whose scalp is patchy with disease.
A white room with lovely windows, a drafting table at its center.
A child named Marcus who is more fragile than his sister.
A spray of oranges on a kitchen floor.
A hotel room with a mirror, her aging face.
A plane rising from the clouds.
A party to celebrate a book.
A beach house with a man
—
long and elegant and beautiful
—
sitting on the porch.
The Skylark somersaults into the January afternoon and tumbles down an embankment. The windows shatter inward. Linda reaches a hand to Thomas and says his name.
Thomas.
Her beloved Thomas. Who will go on to write a series of poems called
Magdalene
about a girl who died in a car crash when she was only seventeen. And who will one day win a prize, and then will lose his daughter and, shortly before four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in Toronto, will take his own life
—
the weight of his losses finally too much to bear.
But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.