Louisa Hall - Trinity

And then I remembered that nurse’s back office, and I ran my fingertip up the soft edge of that feather.

What do these children know, I thought, about killing? What do they know of the intimate details of dying?

Then, for the first time, I looked up with new interest, and saw the women who had come to that party.

I saw Kitty first. She was sitting alone in an armchair. Her legs were pulled up underneath her, and she was wearing a pleated skirt and frilly bobby socks, and she was smoking a cigarette that she tapped off periodically on the ashtray she’d balanced on the fist of the armchair.

And even though she’d always ignored me, and mostly didn’t show up to meetings of the women’s committee, I loved the way she sat in that chair, her shoes kicked off, one arm folded over her chest, surveying her guests as though deciding which one she ought to say something unkind to. And what had she given up, I thought, to find herself here? And who had she become to support her powerful husband?

So I loved her, and I loved Charlotte, and I even loved June Steenberger, unbearably pregnant by now, her forehead covered with sweat and trying not to fall over. She was standing there in the corner, with her hands supporting her own lower back, holding her whole body up while her dumb husband drank another martini. And I loved them all, all those women who’d hoped we’d go home once Germany had surrendered. I loved them because of my bruise, which made me generous and forgiving, so that I walked through that party holding my glass of gin like a flag, keeping my face turned to the good side, and showing those women that I, too, knew what it was to persist in the face of a violence you couldn’t quite comprehend yet.

And whenever the wife beater came over to stand too close and ask what I needed, I put my hand on his arm. I even laughed at his jokes, because even as he delivered the punch line, I knew exactly where Jack stood in the party, and as a result of that knowledge, everything in the room—the hawk’s feather, Kitty’s glass ashtray, June’s gleaming forehead—had been sharpened to the edge of a knife, and there was a thin ringing in one of my ears, as if I were the slate on which the knife had been whetted.

All night that ringing continued, and I could feel Jack’s eyes on the back of my head, and I kept laughing and drinking as the night slipped over its edge. Then Oppie passed around more of his famous martinis, and someone set a Peggy Lee record spinning, and Oppie danced an elaborate, old-fashioned waltz with a girl in a blue dress, and Kitty watched expressionless from her armchair, and later we’d all drunk so much we forgot to turn over the record.

Then there was noise enough between the clinking of glasses and our wild laughter, and in the midst of all that clattering, I. I. Rabi pulled his comb out of his pocket and played it like a harmonica.

By then, June had gone home, leaving her husband, and the girl in the blue dress had gone to sleep on the couch, nestled under a Navajo blanket.

A FEW TIMES, THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF THE EVENING, THE WIFEbeater asked if I’d like to go home. He asked in that way people do when they themselves want to go home, but I pretended I didn’t get it, and told him I was having a fine time, and of course Jack stayed as well, though he never talked to me or my new boyfriend.

Everywhere I went in that room, I could feel him watching me, or watching my new boyfriend. And my new boyfriend watched me as well, and I moved around that living room aware at every moment of where they were standing and who they were watching.

We were in each other’s sights, we really were. Everywhere I went in that hot, crowded room, the awareness of the game we were playing caused the hairs on my arms to stand up and prick, and by then, of course, I was very alive. By then the murder in question hadn’t yet happened. That murder was still in the future, and the only thing we had to decide was which one of us would commit it.

By then, the other couples had long since gone home, and even the sleeping girl had somehow dragged herself off, and the wife beater kept coming over and suggesting that I might be tired, so finally I decided to face him.

“Go home yourself,” I said, “if you’re so eager to leave.”

“But how will you get home?” he said.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

He blinked. “You won’t walk home alone?”

“Of course not,” I said. And then he was gone, and Jack and I were alone, and I thought, We all have such strange ideas about danger.

IT WAS JACK, OF COURSE, WHO WALKED ME HOME IN THE END ANDwe didn’t remember my raincoat. And of course instead of walking me back to the dorm, we walked back to his house, moving under those awful stars, past those shivering clothes on their lines, and it was only then that I felt something had shifted.

It was a sudden and terrible loss. The whole night, inside that party, I’d been exquisitely thrilled. But as soon as Jack and I were outside together, moving through that darkness that smelled like the lake, I began to feel myself emptying out. I looked out at the jagged, black line of the mountains, dark as black ink spilled on black paper, and in that moment, for some awful reason, I remembered those baby rats.

Then I was really afraid. I couldn’t even look up at Jack, who was walking alongside me in silence.

Maybe, I realized, now that the wife beater was no longer a threat, I’d lost what I’d gained in his presence.

Maybe now, once again, I was the ghost of a long-since-murdered woman.

Realizing this, while we walked home along the dried ruts left by the wheels of the jeeps that passed over that road in the springtime, I tried to feel living. I tried to feel as alive as I’d felt in the party. But outside, in the dark, a fear had snuck in, a blade prying the edges of a stuck box.

And when we finally got back to Jack’s house and he went to the bathroom, I wandered through those once-familiar rooms as you’d move through a museum. There was the couch where he once lay with his head on my lap. There was the bowl where he kept his grapefruits. There was the shower from which he’d come dripping wet to sit with me and laugh in his bedroom.

I moved through those rooms as silently as I could, and I’d no more have touched a single thing I found there than I’d have reached across the red velvet ropes to touch a painting in a gallery. Instead, when I’d come to that bedroom I remembered so well, I stood there with my bare arms, shivering slightly, holding myself to try to keep warm, until I felt Jack enter the bedroom behind me.

Ever so gently, he removed my pocketbook from my shoulder. Then he unzipped my dress, then moved to drape it over a chair, and I stood where I was and watched while I followed him to the other side of the bedroom.

There they stood: Jack and myself. And she looked so young, as young as I was when Jack and I met. As young as I was when we played by the lake, when he smiled up at me on the rock and called me to jump into the water.

He touched me so gently, as gently as you might touch a young girl, an innocent girl you’ve recently rescued, and it was as it had been when I’d just arrived on the mesa.

There I was, so recently orphaned, so recently plucked from WAC training and told I was going to Europe, then sent by cover of night on a train heading deeper into the country, across fields of corn and through mountain tunnels, then taken from the mouth of the train and placed on a bus that rattled over the cracked red earth of the valley, passing San Ildefonso and the brown Rio Grande, and finally jagging in switchbacks up the side of the mesa.

I stood there in the bedroom, watching that girl I was when I’d just passed the checkpoints, and I almost wanted to cry.