One long branch refused to be lifted, and when she tugged at it, it broke off in her hands. It was weighted at the other end by a pair of shoes, slim and elegant but scuffed across the toes; above them, a gray suit, and a faded blue shirt pressed open at the collar.
She straightened, holding the branches close to her chest, and looked squarely into Andrew’s long, sad face. “Well,” she said.
Andrew said nothing. He held a little steel pistol whose eye was pointed at her heart.
Now, why should that make her want to laugh? The blue of the steel was lethal-looking, and she was holding the branches so tightly that her muscles were trembling. And above all, she had been through this before; she knew now that it was something to take seriously. Laughter tended to set explosions off. “Why is everything you say so inconsequential?” Timothy had asked, but now the most inconsequential remark of all came into her head, and she said it in spite of herself.
“Where did you get that gun, I wonder,” she said.
Andrew winced, as if he knew what a mistake she had made.
“Plucked it off a tree? Found it in your mother’s sewing box?”
“It was left with me by a friend,” said Andrew. “He went to Europe.”
“Funny friend,” Elizabeth said.
“Things always come to you somehow, if you want them badly enough.”
She had never heard his voice before, except above the noise of the bus station. It was light and frail, breakable-sounding. There was a pulse ticking in his forehead. The hand that held the pistol was shaking, which gave her some hope that his aim might be poor. “Andrew,” she said, “give me the gun now.”
“I can’t. I didn’t want to do this. I warned you and warned you, I wrote you letters. Nothing stops you. I know what you were up to in the gazebo.”
“Really? What was I up to?” Elizabeth asked.
“You’d better take this seriously. I mean it.”
“I am. I know you do,” said Elizabeth. And she did. It was beginning to seem possible that this was the way she would die — in a numb, unreal situation in the orange half-light of a Sunday evening. How could she have guessed, when she woke up this morning and brushed her teeth and chose what shirt to wear? She didn’t even know what date it was. “What’s today’s date?” she asked.
“June seventh,” said Andrew.
She thought it over. June seventh had never had any significance before. She pushed her mind back to Timothy, who had died one day in April because of mistakes that she had made and had rehashed again and again since then, but she had never been sure what she should have done instead. Started crying? Run away? Said she would take him south with her after all?
She made up her mind. She said, “Well, I can see how you feel. Shall I leave Baltimore and not come back?”
Then she spun away from him to start toward the house. She had completed the turn already (she saw Matthew with a suitcase, his back to her, his sisters straggling behind him) and she was just wondering what to do with these dead branches when the gun went off.
The sound had nothing to do with her. It was as distant as the diminished figure of Matthew, who pivoted in mid-step without a pause and dropped the suitcase and started running toward her. The others were a motionless, horror-struck audience; then they came running too. But the first to reach her was Andrew himself. He knocked away the branches she held and picked up her arm. Blood was soaking through the cuff of her sleeve. She felt a hot stab like a bee-sting, exactly where her smallpox vaccination would be.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” Andrew said. “Did I hurt you?”
When Matthew reached her she was laughing. He thought she was having hysterics.
. . .
They took her to old Dr. Felson, who wouldn’t make trouble. He had a dusty, cluttered office opening off his wife’s kitchen. It smelled of leather and rubbing alcohol. And Dr. Felson, as he hunted for gauze, talked like someone out of a western. “A graze,” he said. “A flesh wound. Would you happen to be sitting on my scissors? I’ve seen you here before, I believe.”
“You sewed up a cut for me,” Elizabeth said. “A knife wound on my wrist.”
“Came with young Timothy, didn’t you?” He straightened up from a desk drawer and scowled at Matthew, who was holding tight to Elizabeth’s bleeding arm. “Don’t go getting germs on that,” he said. “Well, Lord. Who was it cut your wrist now? I forget.”
“I cut my wrist,” Elizabeth said.
“You Emersons could support me single-handed.”
“I’m not an—”
“Mind if your blouse is torn?”
“No.”
He slit her sleeve and put something on her arm that burned. Elizabeth hardly noticed. She felt silly and lightheaded, and the pain in her arm was getting mixed up with the stab of light that cut through her brain: Now we are even, no Emersons will look at me ever again as if I owe them something; now I know nothing I can do will change a bullet in its course. “This’ll throb a little tonight,” the doctor said, but Elizabeth only smiled at him. Anyone would have thought Matthew was the one in pain. He held her wrist too tightly, and his face was white. “Don’t worry,” Elizabeth told him. “It looks a lot worse than it feels.”
“Of course it does,” said Dr. Felson. He was wrapping her arm in gauze, which felt warm and tight. “But how about next time? You may not be so lucky.”
“Next time!” Elizabeth said.
“What does Andrew have to say about this? I’ve looked the other way quite a few times in my life, but that boy’s beginning to bother me.”
“Oh, well, he’s apologized,” Elizabeth said.
Dr. Felson snorted and stood up. “If it gets to hurting, take aspirin,” he told her.
“Okay.”
She let Matthew lead her out again, across the wooden porch and into the street. He guided her steps as if she were an old lady. “I’m all right. Really I am,” she said, but he only tightened his arm around her shoulders. His car was waiting beside the curb, packed with people who had missed their travel connections all on account of her. Mary in the front seat, Margaret and Susan and Andrew in the back — peering out of the dusk, their faces pale and anxious, waiting to hear the outcome. “What’s he say?” said Andrew. “Is she all right? Will you be all right?” He loomed out through the window to take a better look, and at the sight of him bubbles of laughter started rising up again in her chest. “Of course I will,” she said, and laughed out loud, and opened the door to pile in among a tangle of other Emersons.
13. 1970
While Peter drove P.J. slept, curled in the front seat with her head in his lap. Long skeins of tow hair strung across his knees, twined around the steering wheel and got caught between his fingers. He kept shaking his hands loose, as if he had dipped them in syrup. Then the hot wind blew up new strands. “P.J.?” he said. “Look, P.J., can’t you stretch out in the back?” P.J. slept on, smiling faintly, while blocks of sunlight crossed her face like dreams.
They were driving back to New Jersey after a week with P.J.’s parents — an old tobacco farmer and his wife who lived on a rutted clay road in Georgia. The visit had not been a success. The gulf between Peter and the Grindstaffs had widened and deepened until P.J., the go-between, could cause a panic if she so much as left the room for a glass of water. She had ricocheted from one side to the other all week, determinedly cheerful and oblivious. Now her head was a weight on his right knee every time he braked; she was limp and exhausted, refilling her supplies of love and gaiety while she slept.