Joan Didion: Run River

Everett hung up.

“You didn’t tell him why.”

“No,” Everett said. “It doesn’t matter.”

He took Lily’s hand.

“Lily. Lily baby.”

She did not take her eyes from him.

“I’m going down to get the gun,” he said.

“Leave the gun. Wait until McGrath comes.”

He shook his head.

“Leave me be,” he said gently. “You sit here.”

Holding her, her head pressed against his chest, he felt the sobs beginning in her frame and knew that she realized it was not going to be the way she had wanted it.

“Wait for the children,” she said. “Julie will be here.”

“I don’t want to see her.”

“Everett—”

“It was all right,” he whispered. “It’s been all right.”

“I love you.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that.”

“Nobody would have known it,” she said. “Nobody. The way it’s been.”

“Known what.”

“That I loved you.”

“I knew it. You knew it.”

She clung to him. He could feel her ribs beneath her dress.

“Listen,” he said. “You have to put on some weight. You have to start eating more and getting some rest. You promise.”

“I promise.”

“All right then.” He kissed her closed eyes.

Sitting on the needlepoint chair where Everett had told her to sit she felt her hands wet, her head hurting (hurting, not aching; it had stopped aching upstairs, an hour ago, when she had first heard the shot), nothing very real. The only real thing had been the shot and she could hear it still, cracking reflexively through all the years before, spinning through the darkness between the games they had all played as children and the games they played now, between the child she had been and whoever she was now, sitting on the needlepoint chair and knowing that he was not going to let her make it all right.

Leave me be . What had it all been about: all the manqué promises, the failures of love and faith and honor; Martha buried out there by the levee in a $250 dress from Magnin’s with river silt in the seams; Sarah in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; her father, who had not much cared, the easy loser (He never could have been , her mother had said and still loved him); her mother sitting alone this afternoon in the big house upriver writing out invitations for the Admission Day Fiesta and watching Dick Clark’s American Bandstand because the Dodgers were rained out; Everett down there on the dock with his father’s.38. She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only cloudily by one or two in each generation, by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother’s dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: of moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.

Leave him be. It was all she could do now, the only present she could make him. Drive far away our ghostly foe and thine abiding peace bestow . Christ on the cross couldn’t drive away that ghostly foe. And maybe once you realized you had to do it alone, you were on your way home. Maybe the most difficult, most important thing anyone could do for anyone else was to leave him alone; it was perhaps the only gratuitous act, the act of love.

She sat on the needlepoint chair until she heard it, the second shot. When she found him, face down with his arm flung out and his head hanging over the edge of the dock, she lay down beside him on the wet boards and talked to him, telling him things for which there had never been any other words: Remember, Everett baby once at the Fair, you lifted me onto the golden bear in front of the Counties Building and kissed me and we laughed. And remember we used to lie in bed mornings, sometimes with Knight in bed between us and I would say don’t go to sleep, he’ll smother, remember how it was and remember the day we took the children to the Cosumnes and it rained and we all sat drinking Cokes under the cottonwood and the rain coming through remember Everett baby remember . She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much .

As she lay holding him against the dark she heard the sirens on the highway, but did not move until the two cars, one McGrath’s and one the Highway Patrol, swung off the levee and down the drive to the house. She stood up then, left Everett and climbed the wooden stairs to the road. In the light down on the verandah McGrath, his pants pulled on with a pajama top, stood with two other men; another man, in a Highway Patrol uniform, waited on the lawn, looking not at the house but at the lighted pool. Watching them as she brushed the leaves from her skirt and licked the blood from the arm she had held around Everett, she began to wonder what she would say, not to them but to Knight and to Julie. She did not know what she could tell anyone except that he had been a good man. She was not certain that he had been but it was what she would have wished for him, if they gave her one wish.

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking . Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live , was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.