HELEN
One of the few games my father played with me when I was a child had us speeding through town as if we were outlaws. He would ask if I heard the sirens behind us, and as soon as I said yes, he would tell me to fasten my seat belt because we were going to drive so fast that no one would ever be able to catch us. As we pulled away from Rose’s house, I was grateful to have found a fond memory of him to relive. I played that game silently, through two stop signs that I barely paused for and a yellow light I had no chance of making, until we reached the end of Laurel. I pulled over just on the other side of the sign that I had memorized when I was ten, and which had never changed since: “Laurel, Inc 1872. Pop: 15752.”
I asked Isaac if he wanted to take one last look back.
“Turn around and enjoy the view,” I said. “Who knows when you’ll see it again?”
Recently harvested cornfields lay on both sides of the road, a silver grain silo a few hundred yards ahead. There were no cars in either direction. The emptiness was one of the things I loved most about the rural Midwest.
Isaac did what I asked him to do. He turned around and stared at the landscape, which was virtually the same as the one in front of him. As soon as he finished, I pulled away. He didn’t know he was leaving, so I said his goodbyes for him. As I drove, I said goodbye to his apartment, to the books that he left behind, to the university library, to all the furniture we had bought together, to the apartment as a whole, and then to every place I could remember that we had gone to together, from the post office to the grocery store and Bill’s diner, and then to David, whom he had never met, and his file, which he had never seen, and then to the rest of Laurel, the parts known and unknown to him.
I finished just as I reached the entrance to the highway. I was far from crying, but at some point several tears had crawled out from under my eyes. Isaac saw them running down my face. He smudged them against my cheek with his thumb.
“What’s happening?”
I knew what I wanted to say: “I’m letting you go, slowly, in pieces, so it won’t break me.” I told him instead that I was thinking of Rose.
When we reached the highway, I asked Isaac to take out the atlas in the glove box and choose the route. He placed it on his lap and began to survey the country. He was delighted when he found a Cairo, an Athens, a Paris, and a Rome in America. He said we should continue going east, like all the signs suggested.
“This country,” he said. “What don’t you have?”
What we didn’t have, for all that space, were many places where Isaac and I could publicly rest without fear of who was watching us. When we stopped for lunch at a restaurant off the highway, it was impossible not to notice the hostile glares of many of the men dining there alone. They were deaf and blind to the world until we entered; once they saw us, all they could do was glare over their coffee cups and from under the brims of their hats. No one said anything to us. Our waitress, who must have been near my mother’s age, called us both “dear” and “honey” with the same general affection. Isaac and I were different with each other — not harsh or cold, as we had been during that terrible lunch at Bill’s, just slightly separated by an invisible, but no less real barrier, a chest-high fence that we could still talk and see through rather than a wall that hid us completely from each other. We did our best not to be bothered. We didn’t hold hands, we didn’t touch, but we kept our eyes focused exclusively on each other as we ate our lunch and drank our coffee. At one point, when neither of us had spoken for several minutes, Isaac said, “On the count of three, laugh.” At three, we began to giggle and then cackle, and then laugh with what felt like genuine delight. We left with the better part of us intact.
Before getting back on the highway, I studied the map; my plan had been to drive straight and then turn north, but I decided now we were better off leaving the southern part of the state as soon as possible. Without telling Isaac, I decided we would go north first, and then cut across.
“Chicago,” I said. I thought of Isaac and me at the Knickerbocker Hotel with the ghost of Al Capone. We were the outlaws now.
We reached Chicago shortly before dusk. We drove along the lakeshore. I wanted to find the Knickerbocker Hotel but had no idea how to.
“It’s not fair,” Isaac said.
“What?”
He pointed out the window to the lake.
“You have oceans even in the middle of the country.”
“It’s not an ocean,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Your lakes are my ocean. My forest is your jungle. America is a world, not a nation.”
We slowed to a crawl just as Chicago came into view. I had never been in a city anywhere near that size; I had never seen so many cars. I grew anxious thinking about how many people there must have been inside them. I felt like we were driving into something alive, with white gleaming spires on top of its buildings for teeth.
Every time we came to a complete stop, I turned to Isaac. He was enthralled by the view, as I suspected he would be.
He pointed to the tallest building we could see through the windshield.
“That must be the Hancock Center.”
He reached over and caressed my forearm. I took that as proof he had no idea what I was planning.
“This will be lovely,” he said.
ISAAC
There was no one along the path back to Joseph’s village. I expected that I would find traces of the war — more refugees, soldiers — but it was just as empty as it had been before. When I reached the band of houses that marked the town’s northern border, I heard the lorry engines approaching. Assuming Isaac was still alive, he would be back by now. I didn’t run, but I was desperate to see him again and walked as fast as I could while trying not to give the impression I was fleeing. When I reached the main road of the village, I saw that there were three lorries already parked, halfway in between the bronze fist and the Life Hotel. Dozens of soldiers were crowded into the beds of the first two. There was no crowd to greet them. The entire village had heard the engines and retreated indoors. The only truly communal knowledge was fear, and in this case everyone had the same response.
The soldiers descended from the back of the lorries; I was alone on the street watching them. The first to exit were clearly tired; they walked slowly and took time to regain their balance after landing, but they could do so on their own. That was true only for the first ones, however. Each group was more injured than the one that preceded it. There were the soldiers with minor wounds, cuts, and bruises across their chests and forearms, followed by those who had at least one limb badly injured — an arm in a sling, a thigh wrapped in bandages. Then, finally, came those who were almost dead, and those who might live but would suffer greatly for what little remained of their lives; all of these had to be carried out.