Sweet Everlasting (36 page)

Still—it’s hard at times not to feel euphoric. Reed says that except for the diphtheria antitoxin and Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, this is the most important scientific finding of the nineteenth century. His friends joke that he’ll be the next surgeon general. He smiles his charming smile, modest as always. And yet, I think I see a twinkle of excitement in his eyes at the prospect—which is not farfetched to me in the least. I count myself the luckiest of men to have served under him on this commission. Whatever reward is in store for Walter Reed is a thousand times deserved.

So. It’s over. In hindsight, as with all successful detective cases, I suppose, what seemed mysterious now appears almost ridiculously obvious, and the real mystery is how the truth could have been overlooked for so long. What we didn’t understand was the
time—
the crucial secret that the mosquito can only contract the virus from a victim in the first
two or three days
of the disease, and that
12 to 14 days
have to pass before the virus can multiply enough within the bug to enable it to infect another victim. That’s why the sudden outbreak of yellow jack on a ship two weeks at sea confounded us, why—

But I’m doing it again. I apologize; these details must bore you to distraction. I wonder if you even read my letters anymore. If you do, they must seem like jottings from the planet Saturn, by some creature you knew vaguely in another life. I have no excuse, unless it’s—

“Shit.”

Tyler threw his pen down in disgust, and a blotch of black ink marred the paragraph he’d just written. Good. He’d been about to write the word “loneliness.” So it had come to this: trying to get Carrie to write back by making her feel sorry for him. The plaintive tone of the ink-blotted paragraph embarrassed him. He snarled at it, grabbed his warm glass of brandy and soda, and carried it to the doorway, hoping for a fresh perspective.

Another perfect day. How profoundly sick he was of perfect days. Carrie, he recalled, professed to like all days, all weathers. She had a particular fondness for the brown, dreary, truly ugly ones because, she said, they were temporary, they were friendless and pathetic, and they made good days seem even more beautiful by comparison. But surely the gorgeous sameness of the Cuban skies would daunt even Carrie’s boundless enthusiasm eventually. Then again … probably not.

His memories of her were vivid and relentless, and lately they had all been of the last time he’d seen her on Dreamy Mountain that final, wrenching night. He’d come to her in her hospital at dusk, and she’d been pottering around in her old blue dress, her beautiful hair awry as usual, smiling to herself.
Smiling.
Later, she’d held his hand and told him, “I’ll be fine. I’m happy now, I swear it.” And when he’d kissed her and gone away, she hadn’t cried.
He’d
wanted to cry, but Carrie hadn’t shed a tear.

Recognizing the petulance, the discomfitingly churlish tenor of his thoughts, he set his glass down and rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles. His mind slid effortlessly—from habit—to the night she’d given herself to him. Another woman contemplating such a choice might have waited for the magic words, the sedative, talismanic “I love you” from her intended lover before she risked everything. Carrie hadn’t. She’d said them to
him.
“Did you think I thought you would marry me?” he could hear her asking. “Oh, Ty, I just love you. I just love you.”

She had loved him, and the gift was absolutely free, absolutely without conditions. Because no one had ever loved him in that way before, he hadn’t known quite what to do with Carrie’s gift. It hadn’t pleased him; it had made him guilty and uneasy. Not guilty enough to
refuse
what she was offering, of course; oh no, he’d been glad enough to accept that. He’d enjoyed her as long as he could, and squared it with his conscience by making sure he gave her as much pleasure as he received. As if that made them even.

And how lovely it had been. He shut his eyes tight, lost in a familiar blur of sensual recollection. Being with Carrie had made his liaisons with previous women seem practically sordid in comparsion. No—that was an exaggeration, “sordid.” Barren, then. Yes, barren. The very word.

And now she wouldn’t even write to him. Was this to be his punishment? To realize too late that the only woman he would ever love in quite this way, certainly the only woman who would ever love
him
with such an open, unselfish heart, had given him up and gone on with her life without him? If so, harsh as it was, it was a fitting punishment, because his reason for not recognizing what he’d had when he’d had it filled him with shame.

The truth was, as much as he enjoyed casting fond, superior, supercilious aspersions on his mother’s high-minded hopes for him—the
truth
was that he shared them. Oh, not her
specific
hopes: he wanted no political career; his goal in life wasn’t to be famous. At least not for the same things Carolivia wanted him to be famous for. His hopes for himself were nobler—perhaps—but were they any less self-gratifying? He wanted to cure diseases and reduce human suffering; he truly wanted that, genuinely and unambivalently, and he was fully prepared to devote his life to accomplishing it. Ah, but if he were
recognized
for it—if respected medical men admired him, wrote papers and dissertations based on his brilliant theories—if, God help him, they gave him
prizes
and
accolades
for his accomplishments—would he turn his back on the rewards? Far from it.

He had a picture of the rest of his life in his mind’s eye, and whether he cared to admit it or not, Carolivia had helped draw it for him. Because he wanted to accomplish so much, he’d always seen himself, in the successful future, as a man who lived and thrived in the rarefied world of science. When he’d bothered to envision a partner in that life at all, he’d seen someone like Adele, someone familiar and comfortable, and eminently suitable. Suitable for what? Enhancing his esteem. Fulfilling his barely conscious dream of
himself.
But although he’d grown up with her, he hardly knew Adele. It didn’t matter: from childhood everyone had assumed that they would marry. If, one day, he’d decided
not
to marry her, the reason—how demoralizing it was to admit this—would’ve been to thwart his mother, and not because he’d ever looked honestly at Adele and realized they didn’t suit. And it was no consolation to know that her disappointment would’ve been as skin-deep as her happiness had he married her.

But never, not in a wild, maverick dream, had he ever seen himself linked for life—in the picture in his mind’s eye—with someone like Carrie Wiggins. She was a foreigner; she might as well be from another country, another world. She didn’t fit any niche or type he or anyone else in his set had ever known, ever even imagined. She was impossible. Eventually—how democratic of him!—he’d brought himself around to sleeping with her. But marry her? Good God. Out of the question. Not done, old man, simply not done.

His hypocrisy mortified him. He delighted in tweaking his mother and her sort for their hidebound social and political philosophies. Prosperous and potbellied, he called them. There was nothing he enjoyed more than reminding his own contented, conservative, conformist Philadelphia cronies of how enlightened he was compared to them. But he dearly loved a mountain girl named Carrie Wiggins, and her preposterous
unsuitability
to his comfort, his complacency, and above all his ambitions had prevented him from knowing it until it was too late. Too late. She wouldn’t even write him a letter.

The perfect sunset depressed him. He went back into his room and sat down at the oak mess table he used for a desk, blinking down like an owl at the ink-stained last page of his letter to Carrie. Had he been too restrained? Yes, but he’d done it on purpose, written her brief, factual accounts of his time, leaving out anything that would remind her too strongly of the past they’d shared. That was the
kind
thing to do, he’d convinced himself. But, of course, fear had had at least as much to do with it as kindness.

Later, though, as the weeks and months passed, he’d found himself wanting more and more to write her long, personal letters full of his fears and dreams. He’d wanted to send her photographs of the camp, and silly pictures of his friends and himself, cutting up like soldiers away from home. He’d wanted to send her gifts, and jokes, and articles clipped from magazines that might interest or amuse her. In short—he’d wanted to act like a lover.

Too late. Obviously she was finished with him, and she had been since the night he’d ridden down the mountain and out of her life. Rightly so. She’d been too kind or too gentle to tell him then, but she’d known. He remembered her silence when he’d said he would write to her. She’d known
then
she would never write back. Why should she? Carrie was strong; it ought not to surprise him that her very strength kept her from hanging onto a memory that must bring her nothing but pain. Why should she?

Oh, but Carrie, Carrie,
he thought, picking up his discarded pen, twisting it in his fingers.
Bear with me, my love. Be gentle again, forgive me one more time. I’m slow, but I’m rock steady, and now that I know the truth, I’m ready to claim you. Could you call this a grace period, this time I’ve needed to know myself?

“My dearest Carrie,” he wrote on a new page, and laughed out loud at how right it looked. He hadn’t even finished his brandy; otherwise he’d have thought he was drunk. “My dearest Carrie. What an idiot I’ve been. Let’s get married.” He laughed again, and crumpled the paper into a ball. No point in scaring her to death.

“My dear Carrie. I’ll be home in a week. May I come and see you?”

Too abrupt.

“Dear Carrie,

I’ve been remembering the last time I saw you—the last moment. You were kneeling beside Louie, holding him so he wouldn’t run after me, and your face in the twilight was full of sadness. You waved back to me, and the last I saw of you was the lacy white cuff of your blue dress. Even in sorrow, you looked strong to me, and natural; you fit, in my mind, in front of your cabin in the trees, with your mountain rising up dark and heavy behind you. And that night you told me you were happy. For a long time, those words and that picture gave me comfort. But they don’t any longer. Forgive me, Carrie, I don’t want you to be happy anymore, not without me. I want—”

“Dr. Wilkes? Afternoon post, sir.”

The trooper from the Seventh Cavalry who delivered mail to the barracks stood at semi-attention on the dusty steps outside the door, sweating in his khakis. Tyler got up and went to retrieve the short stack of envelopes the soldier held out to him. They gave each other lackadaisical salutes, and the trooper drifted away.

Before he was halfway back to his desk, Ty saw Carrie’s letter.

He carried it to his bunk in both hands. One of his most abiding fantasies in the past few weeks was that she’d written to him often, but somehow her letters had gotten lost.
Here they were.
How very odd; a minute ago he’d been castigating himself for being a selfish imbecile, for throwing a rare treasure away out of ignorance and arrogance. Was this any way to reinforce the lesson—to receive, to hold in his hands, his very heart’s desire? He must not have gotten the whole message anyway, because Carrie’s letter—so thick, so heavy, her loopy handwriting so heartbreakingly dearfelt like a reward he deserved after a long period of suffering. He was going to have to work on that “deserved” part, he supposed.

Later, though. Not now. He felt the stupid grin stretching wider and wider between his ears. In a matter of seconds, his life had righted itself. He sat down on his cot and opened Carrie’s letter.

He saw the money first. Uncomprehending, he took out the single sheet of paper folded around it. Dried leaf-pieces and a tiny twig floated down to his lap; he brushed them away with an absent hand while he scanned the page, dismayed to see that Carrie’s message was only a paragraph long. The second sentence stopped his heart.

Dear Tyler,

You told me once it takes 5 days to get to Cuba. If a letter takes the same, then I guess in 5 days after you read this I’ll be married to Eugene.

“A
ND THIS TIME DON’T
come back,” Carrie commanded in a whisper. “Hear me? I don’t want to see you again, or any members of your immediate family. This is good-bye.”

With a flourish, she opened her cardboard trap and stood back so the big-eared, long-tailed mouse inside wouldn’t panic as much when he scampered away toward the stone wall and freedom. Of course, there was no way to tell if he was the same mouse she’d caught and deported about six times by now during the annual autumn-long game, but she liked to think he was. She’d never taken him this far away before, halfway up the ridge behind her house to the crumbling stone fence, where he’d have plenty of natural food and protection. She wished there was some way she could mark him, for if he followed her home from this distance—well, for heaven’s sake, she’d just have to let him stay. Even if he did keep her awake at night, hunting for crumbs in her kitchen.

The air smelled like snow. Through the black pine branches, the stony December sky looked glutted and overweight. If it did snow, it would be the first fall of the season. Three nights ago there had been an ice storm, but it melted early and by nine in the morning everything went back to looking smoke-gray and somber.

Back in the cabin, Carrie apologized to Lou for leaving him locked in. “But we know whose fault that is, don’t we?” she reminded him. He was getting better about chasing things, but an escaping mouse still would’ve been too much for him. Sometimes she despaired of Louie. One day she might just have to face it: he was no Shadow, and chances were he was never going to be.

While she was taking off her coat, the mantel clock struck three. She’d never disliked a particular time of the day before, but lately the short, dark, dreary afternoons had been making her feel blue and mopey. With a sigh, she sat down at the table and pulled the half-empty bowl of black walnuts toward her. Tedious, delicate, time-consuming task, shelling black walnuts. She did it every winter with scarcely a thought, but this year she found the job almost intolerable. She felt restless and melancholy, keyed up and depressed, and today was the worst day yet. No need to ask herself why. It was the tenth of December, and by now Ty had surely gotten her letter.