Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

I go to Detroit on many weekends. With this job, it is harder than I planned, but when I cannot make it, Barbara sends Nathaniel down. On my second trip up there, Barbara suggested I stay with them. One thing led to another and we have, in a sort of half-ass way, been reconciled. She is not likely to come back here. Her job has worked out well, and the truth, I think, is that she enjoys the distance from me and the reminders. Neither of us expects the present arrangement to last. Sooner or later the swelling will recede and one of us will meet somebody else. When I think about that, I hope it's a woman a few years younger I would like to have another child. But that's the kind of thing no one can plan. For the present, Nat seems to take comfort from the fact that his mother and I are still married, not divorced.

At times, I admit, I still think of Carolyn. There is none of that crazy longing left, none of the bizarre fixation. I guess she has finally found her place of rest for me. But I puzzle on the experience now and then. What was it, I still think. What was it I wanted with her? What seemed so imperative about it all? In the end, it must have had something to do with my sense of the torment, the agonies which drove her. That legacy of pain was openly displayed in her hard-shell manner, her hipped-up weariness, her ardent courtroom spokesmanship for the likes of Wendell McGaffen, the assailed and woebegone. She was herself someone who had suffered vastly-and who claimed in every visible aspect of her being to have triumphed over it all. That was not true. She could no more leave the horrible weight of her past behind than those Greek heroes could fly close to the sun. But does that mean it is impossible for all of us?

I reached for Carolyn. In a part of me, I knew my gesture was ill-fated. I must have recognized her troubled vanity, the poverty of feeling that reduced her soul. I must have known that what she offered was only the grandest of illusions. But still I fell for that legend she had made up about herself. The glory. The glamour. The courage. All her determined grace. To fly above this obscure world of anguish, this black universe of pain! For me there will always be that struggle to escape the darkness. I reached for Carolyn. I adored her, as the faith healer is adored by the halt and lame. But I wanted with wild, wild abandon, with a surging, defiant, emboldened desire, I wanted the extreme-the exultation, the passion and the moment, the fire, the light. I reached for Carolyn. In hope. Hope. Everlasting hope.