Reflection (18 page)

“If there's ever any way I can help you, please let me know.” She could hear the emptiness in that offer and was not surprised by his derisive snort as he shook his head and returned to his work. For the first time, she regretted having given Phil's money away. It could have been used here to help people like this young man.

Slowly, she pushed her cart away from the produce section and started down the dairy aisle. She was clinging to the cart, her knees rubbery, and the edges of her vision blackened briefly. This must be how Gram feels half the time, she thought to herself. Weak-kneed and dazed. She couldn't faint here, couldn't draw that attention to herself. “I'm sorry,” she said again, to the air.
It wasn't my fault
, she wanted to say. She'd been a victim, too.

She finished her shopping with a wooden concentration, considering all the while the possibility of returning to the produce section and talking again with Kenneth. She turned her cart in that direction a few times but couldn't make herself go to him. What could she say? She was afraid to see his face close up, to feel what the mother of that young man must feel each time she set eyes on him. His mother must relish having someone to blame.

Once outside the store, Rachel unloaded her groceries, all the while imagining that the few people in the parking lot were staring at her. She was getting paranoid. She drove out of the lot, but instead of turning onto Farmhouse Road toward her grandmother's house, she turned right, toward town. She drove resolutely into the heart of Reflection, parked her car in front of the library, and in spite of the perishables in her trunk, walked over to the small circular park in the center of town, across the street from Huber Pond.

The park was deserted, and she felt an odd relief as the oaks and maples and birch trees closed behind her, making her less visible to the rest of the world. Yet she knew it was not relief this park had to offer her. As she slowly walked among the trees, she counted the weeping cherries, not stopping until she'd found all ten of them. At the tenth, she turned in a circle, her eyes searching for the stone memorial that had to be nearby. There it was, a sloping, symmetrical arc of fieldstone. She walked toward it slowly. Bouquets of cut flowers, some dried and dying, others fresh as though someone had brought them only minutes earlier, had been propped up against the memorial. At the peak of the stone arc was a bronze plaque.

In Remembrance of the Ten Children of Reflection Lost to Us on

September 10, 1973

That We May Never Forget

A list of the children's names followed: William Albrecht, Fredric Cash, Ruth Kitchin, Annie Paris, Patrice Rader, Jennifer Wright, Julia Shouse, Gary Feldman, Jacob Geyer, and Thomas Pike.

A list of strangers, Rachel thought. Too many names over the years. And these ten. Had she even known when she'd fled town which children had died? She couldn't remember. But she had to remember.

She straightened one of the bouquets of flowers that had fallen onto its side, then took a seat on a nearby bench.

She had been twenty-three years old when she returned home from the Peace Corps, leaving Michael behind her in Rwanda. She interviewed for several jobs and was offered the position at Spring Willow Elementary. Then she found an apartment and her father spent the weekend before Luke was to arrive helping her move her things from the old triplex into the even older one-bedroom apartment. Her mother talked to her about Luke, about how excited she must be to see him after all this time, and her father joked about how no one would bother them for a full week. Longer, if they liked.

“You kids just get to know each other again,” he said. “We'll have plenty of time to spend with you later.” She loved him for his understanding, but she couldn't explain to him that it didn't seem to matter to her. She couldn't rid her mind of thoughts of Michael, of her last memory of him, his hand cradling her bare breast. She couldn't tell her parents that she felt no longing to spend time alone with her husband, that she wished with all her heart that she did.

She met Luke in the Harrisburg airport, and he hugged her hard. He was still handsome, although his body had changed. He looked thinner, but when she embraced him she felt the hardness of him beneath her arms, as though all softness had left his body and the muscle that remained had grown taut and tight. He felt like a stranger, but he whispered into her ear as he hugged her, “Beautiful lady,” and that sounded like the Luke she knew.

He was protective of his luggage, checking the bags, wanting to be sure he left nothing behind. He carried three pieces, she carried two as they walked out to the car, and when she set one of the suitcases down to fumble in her pocket for the parking ticket, he grabbed her arm.

“Keep your eye on it!” he snapped, pointing to the suitcase. The bag was so close to her, it almost rested against her leg, and she knew then that the Luke who had left her a year earlier was not the Luke who had returned. He seemed as angry, as tightly wired, as he had been during their painful week-long visit in San Francisco. Maybe worse.

He was quiet in the car.

“Are you tired?” she asked, wondering if that was the reason for his silence.

“Not really.” He was looking out the window, watching Pennsylvania roll by, and the silence mounted between them.

This was ridiculous. Her oldest friend, and she could think of nothing to say to him.

“I've missed you,” she tried, although it was not quite the truth.

“You, too.” He smiled at her, but it was a quick smile. Forced.

What could she say? She couldn't begin to sum up her experience of the past year any better than he could his. Focus on the present, she told herself.

“I think you'll like the apartment,” she said.

He turned to look at a passing motorcycle. “Sure,” he said.

Another few minutes passed.

“Everyone's looking forward to seeing you,” she tried.

He let out a short, disdainful laugh, and she looked at him in confusion.

“Everyone's so protected here, you know?” he asked. “I mean, it's a shitty world out there, and I've seen the most fucked-up parts of it.”

She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, unaccustomed to hearing Luke swear.

“Reflection kind of feels like Disneyland to me now,” he said. “You grew up your whole life here, like I did. You can't know what kind of fucking shit there is in the world when you're—”

“I just spent a year in an impoverished, destitute region in Africa, Luke.” She felt angry. Patronized. “I know it wasn't like what you had to go through, I know I wasn't in that kind of danger, but please don't talk to me like I've been living in an ivory tower.”

He pounded a fist on the dashboard. “Pull this damn car over to the side of the road.”

“What? Luke—”

“Pull it the fuck over!”

She quickly put on her turn signal and slipped as carefully as she could out of traffic and onto the shoulder.

“Turn it off.”

Her fingers shook as she turned the key in the ignition.

“You don't have any fucking idea what I'm talking about, do you?” he said. “Fine. You've been in Rwanda. You've seen people suffer. But did you kill anyone, huh?” He grabbed her arm, tugging her toward him. “Huh? Did you? Did you watch your buddies get blown away? Watch their legs fly off? Feel one of their bloody, unattached hands whack you in the face?”

She shook her head. She felt sick. Her arm hurt where he was squeezing it.

“Well, then, let me tell you, girl. You were in the Garden of Eden compared to where I was.” He let go of her and sat back in the seat, pointing ahead of them on the road. “Let's go,” he said.

But she couldn't move. She was crying, hugging herself, her arms across her chest. She raised one hand, touched him tentatively on his forearm. “Luke, I don't want to start out like this. This is supposed to be a happy time, seeing each other after so long, finally getting to live together.”

His face was red, and he slumped down in the seat. “I'm sorry,” he said, but he didn't look at her. He pulled his arm from under her hand to scratch his head. “You've got to expect this. You can't expect me to come home after what's happened and be like I was when I left.”

He looked at her now, and she thought she detected a trace of the man she'd known for so long.

“It helped me while I was in ‘Nam and at Fort Myer to know I had you back home,” he said. “To know we'd gotten married, that I had a wife. That I could come home and we could start a family and maybe be normal.” He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. “That's all I want now, Rachel. To have a normal life. I used to think that sounded boring. Now it sounds better than anything else.”

“We'll have it.” She leaned toward him, kissed him. His eyes glistened, and she felt the old, welcome love lift her up. She put her arms around him. “People will admire us for our normality,” she said.

He smiled at that, an old Luke smile. “Take me to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Rachel,” he said. “Take me home.”

THERE WERE MOMENTS IN
the next few weeks when she caught glimpses of the boy she'd grown up with, the boy she'd loved as a brother, as a friend, as a man and a lover, but they were too few to ease her mind, and too weak to counterbalance the changes that were far more apparent in him. He had nightmares. He awakened nearly every night, sweat soaking the sheets, and she felt guilty that she had not paid the extra money it would have cost them for an air-conditioned apartment. She bought a window unit for the bedroom, but still the nightmares continued, the damp, alarming awakenings, and she knew it was nothing as simple as the heat that was disturbing him. Sometimes he was crying when he woke up in the middle of the night, sometimes he was yelling, words Rachel couldn't understand. Once their landlord called to complain about the noise, and Rachel knew that normality was a long way off.

He was rough when he made love. She'd had no other lover, ever, and she had treasured the tenderness he'd always shown her as they'd learned to give each other pleasure. Now, though, he was fast, plowing into her as if he were angry with her. Sometimes she felt as if he hated her. She began to wonder if he'd come to hate women in general. He referred to women on the street as ‘”bitches” or “cows.” He told her about the prostitutes in Vietnam, or the women the soldiers would rape. He told her those things without judgment, and she couldn't be sure if he condoned them. He might even have been speaking about himself as one of those men, but she was too afraid of the answer to ask him.

He had weapons, and that was something else she couldn't ask him about. Had he bought them? Stolen them? She awakened in the middle of one air-conditioned night to find him sitting in the living room, dressed in his uniform, cleaning his rifle. He had the rifle, some grenades, a knife. He bought books on weapons, read them at meals. She was afraid of what was happening to him and to their young marriage, but she was not afraid of Luke himself. Occasionally, he scared her when he yelled at her or grabbed her roughly, but she had known him too long, too intimately, to truly fear him. Even when she saw him lovingly working on his rifle, she only tiptoed back to bed, confused and worried but not concerned for her physical safety. Slowly, though, the love she had felt for him over the years was turning to pity.

He needed help. That was clear, but he refused to seek it. She called the military counselor at Fort Myer, who said they'd had no problems with Luke down there. He gave her the name of a psychiatrist in Lancaster and encouraged her to get Luke to see the man, but Luke's resistance was strong. He had no problems, he said.

The one person Rachel needed right then was Michael. Not for herself—she would put her own need for him aside. She needed him for Luke. Together they could help him. The three of them had been there for one another all their lives. As September neared she toyed with the idea of somehow getting in touch with him. Maybe he could get to a phone. Maybe he could even come home. Surely this situation was akin to a family emergency. Luke needed his old friend. And she needed Michael to see what was going on, to tell her she was not going crazy. She could no longer judge what was appropriate behavior and what was not. She wouldn't recognize normality if she saw it.

But she held back from trying to get word to Michael and was quickly swept up into her new teaching job. Luke himself was unemployed, although he looked for work almost daily. He had his own degree in teaching, but it was September and schools weren't hiring.

During Rachel's first week at Spring Willow, Luke appeared at the school twice. Once she didn't even know he was there. She learned later that he had simply roamed through the halls dressed in camouflage, saluting anyone, child or adult, who crossed his path. The second time, he came to her classroom and loudly offered to tell her students about life in battle. The children were wide-eyed at the sight of a real soldier in their midst. The boys were wild with questions; the girls—with the notable exception of Lily Wright—were shy in their awe.

“You have to leave, Luke,” Rachel told him.

“But they want to talk with me, don't you, kids?” he said, and he was right. Frightened or fascinated, they were captivated by the presence of the handsome soldier.

“We'll have you come back when there's more time,” she bargained. “Right now we're in the middle of a lesson.”

She finally got him to leave with that ruse, but she knew this couldn't continue. She put in a call to the psychiatrist, setting up an appointment for Luke for the following Thursday. She didn't know how she would get him there, but she knew there was no alternative. Clearly, he had to go.

The following day, a Friday, Jacob Holt called her into his office. The principal was ordinarily a kind man whom she had liked very much during her interview. He had become principal the year after she'd left Spring Willow Elementary as a student, so he'd been there for quite a while by then. She was not aware of how stern he could be, but she didn't blame him at all for his concern. She shared it.