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fall 1999
Henry never knew what happened, where Aaron had gone off to, but he knew that Luce was suddenly everywhere and never left his side. The two of them ate together, ran to the market together. Henry even finished up her driving lessons and then went with her to the DMV to get her first-ever driver’s license.
After that, he sent her to the market alone.
He took her for walks around the property, showing her where Suzannah had learned how to swim, where Sammy had learned how to throw and catch a baseball. He’d barely spoken about Sammy since he’d died. It was nice having someone else around who knew his name. They wandered all the little garden plots that Lucille had tended over the years, plucking flowers to bring inside and herbs to sprinkle on their eggs in the mornings.
Luce was often silent again, now that Aaron was gone. Henry figured it was none of his business, whatever had happened, but she needed his company now more than she ever had. She spent as much time near him as she could, following him around and asking him just enough questions to keep him talking. So, he kept going. He told her what Lucille was like when they’d gotten married, and before that, too. Stories about Suzannah—all the happy ones. He explained the history of Grace and the area. “Doesn’t really sound any different,” Luce pointed out, after hearing a description of the town in his childhood.
One day, while Henry was leading her through their neck of the woods, he got an idea. They were back at the house an hour later, and he told her that he had to run to Portland and would be back that evening. She looked nervous about being alone but bristled when he asked if she was okay. As he drove down Route 1, a feeling came over him that had been foreign for a long, long time: anticipation. He wouldn’t tell Luce what he was doing, he decided. It meant that he wouldn’t get to see her reaction, but really, that was all for the better. It was more exciting that way.
In the last few months, since he’d visited Lucille’s grave, Henry had had a bit of a comeback. He was full of energy and felt compelled to get things done. He was fixing things around the house that had needed attention for years, and since Luce was always tagging along, he was teaching her how to do it, too. She knew how to unclog a toilet; clear the gutters; build a fire; gather and store water from the well; change the oil in the truck; fill nail holes in the walls; caulk the tub; fix a dripping faucet; rake leaves; bring the trash to the dump; oil a squeaky hinge; and load, shoot, clean, and store his rifle. Every new skill satisfied her and reassured him. And she was quite good, he thought. She picked up on everything fast. It made him proud to see. It also made him wonder why he’d never taught Suzannah any of these things.
Some weeks ago, he had brought out the stack of journals that Lucille had kept while she’d been sick. He read a bit of them each night now, before he went to sleep. She’d written about praying, about her conversations with Pastor Dan, about how much she loved it when he yelled at the doctors for her. She’d written about their children, all of them, and about how she hoped to hold them when she got to the other side. Her final entry, written only a handful of weeks before she’d died, had stayed with him:
The doctor came this morning. He seems to think there’s not much time left. Henry did not like that. I feel very weak in my body but very strong in my spirit. I can feel and almost see God speaking to me and telling me it will be okay. I know that He will make everything okay. He is telling me that I don’t have to worry.
He had noticed her prayers and her peace, but he hadn’t realized it had gone this far. A part of him was angry, reading all of this—angry with her for not explaining it to him more fully; angry with Pastor Dan for getting a part of his wife that he didn’t get; angry, of course, with God for taking her in the first place. But the anger was so much smaller than it had once been. Yes, she was gone. But she’d been happier at the end than she’d been in years. He supposed he had to be grateful for that. And if it was God (and Pastor Dan) who’d made her happy in the end, he supposed he had to be grateful for that, too.
Henry drove on, watching the leaves that were changing and letting the thoughts swirl in his head. He smiled, remembering unexpected moments of peace in the time after she’d come home from the hospital for the last time. They’d spent entire days lying in bed and talking or napping. In that way, at least, there had been a certain peace and comfort, much like their days as newlyweds. He often watched her fall asleep and then doze off himself, only to wake up and see her watching him with a little smile on her face. Towards the end, she hadn’t been able to do much, but he’d read her eyes until the very end. Her eyes hadn’t changed.
If asked, he’d have attributed her peace to a combination of morphine and her own general goodwill, but now, having read her journals, he wondered if there really had been something to her prayers and her time with Pastor Dan. He’d thought God was a moot point in their relationship—He certainly was for Henry. But maybe she’d had some yearning all along.
Henry sighed. He knew what he was about to do, and he felt pretty foolish, but the car provided the perfect opportunity.
“God.” He said the word once, just to try it out. And then he tried it again after a moment. “God.” He sighed and shook his head. “Jesus,” he muttered, to himself this time. “What am I doing?” Squeezing the steering wheel, he addressed God head-on. “You’ve never been there for me before, have you? Did you have to take all my children from me? All of them? You couldn’t have left me one? You took my father from me. You took my sister from me, and you might as well have taken my mother then, too. You took my youth from me in Europe. You took every child I made, one by one by one by one, and finally, when I’d just come to terms with it all, you took my wife. What did any of them ever do?”
Henry had started this speech in a whisper, but his voice had gradually grown louder until he was shouting. He hadn’t meant to say any of this; he was shocked at himself. This prayer, if it was a prayer, wasn’t like anything he’d been taught in Sunday school.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he told himself, figuring he might as well get it all out. “What about Luce? I bet she was born in some crummy apartment—no nurse, no doctor, no medicine. And what good could Suzannah have been to her, the way she was when she ran off? And what am I supposed to do about her? Couldn’t you have at least kept Lucille here until Luce came?”
Lucille is not the one she needs. And Lucille is not the one who needs her.
Henry didn’t hear those words audibly, but neither did he simply think them. His experience of the words was somewhere between a feeling and a sound but, somehow, both. It was gentle, but the force with which they’d cut into his train of thought left him shaking at the wheel.
“What was that?” he whispered.
Over the next thirty minutes until Henry got to his lawyer’s office, he tried several times to confront God again, but he couldn’t. Every time he opened his mouth, the words came back to him:
Lucille is not the one she needs. And Lucille is not the one who needs her.
Luce need him? It was easier to see how he could need her—absolution and one last chance to connect with the world before he left it. But why on earth would she need him? Why would anyone need him? And had that been God, speaking to him? Was he going crazy?
Henry slid into a parking spot at his lawyer’s office, but he couldn’t get out right away. He sat in the car for ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty. He didn’t recognize himself—he was a jaded, cynical, often mean, angry old man. Yet here he was, having—for lack of any better phrase—an encounter. A revelation. It was an utterly foreign experience, and he missed his appointment trying to figure it all out.
Much later that evening (he’d had to wait until after five, when his lawyer was finally available), Henry got back into the car, satisfied for the first time in a long time. In more ways than one, he felt that if he died that night, everything would be taken care of.