Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

“Say no more,” Miles had responded. Pleasant to have a concrete task, after all the meetings and the long hours discussing reports on suspicious people.

On the loading dock, he found rows of canvas mailbags, each stuffed to the top with the freshly printed forms and waiting for him to take charge. He opened one, releasing an inky odor so sharp that one of his lieutenants, standing a few feet away, turned with a startled look and the other said, “We’ll have to be careful where we store those.” Together they went to look for a hiding place.

Discussions, measurements, more discussion; an argument over whether to unload the sacks or move them intact. By the time they’d arranged the forms in a small room on the second floor and installed a new padlock, Miles was feeling feverish. Down the stairs he went, looking forward to the sight of Naomi’s face and the comfort of the car seat as they drove up the hill to her mother’s house, but outside, there was no Naomi. He walked to one end of the block and peered down the cross street: nothing. Wearily he walked back and sat — why should he have to do this? — on the stone bench in front of the pharmacy. If she felt for him a trace of what he felt for her, she would never, he feared, keep him waiting like this.

WHILE HE FRETTED, she was busy in her room. In the days since Miles had disrupted Irene’s second talk, since he and her mother had ignored her wishes and forced her into this full-time driving job, her body had obediently managed the Model T but her mind had been seething. Why was nothing up to her anymore? Because Miles decided he was too busy for the Wednesday afternoon gatherings, she was cut off from them. Because she couldn’t get to our gatherings, she had no chance to talk to Leo. Because Eudora was working with Irene every spare minute, she couldn’t ask Eudora for help; everywhere she turned she was blocked. Blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, half her time and more this past week wasted driving Miles here and there, watching him open doors and vanish inside and pop out again a few minutes later, each time climbing back in the car with his head sticking out from his chest like a chicken’s. How could a man look like both a sheep and a chicken? He did, though; it made her sick to imagine him fussing self-importantly with the other men too old or too weak to be soldiers. He’d claimed he needed her specifically, rather than a man hired at the garage, because he had to have someone he could trust. Amazing that he thought he could trust her.

She’d left him at the post office, driven home, gone straight up to his room and stolen a shirt and, from the top desk drawer, some money. Not all of it — he’d stashed so much he probably couldn’t be sure what was missing — but enough to help her. As they’d been arguing, what she’d threatened idly, so many times before, suddenly seemed both easy and obvious: she would run away, in a few weeks or a month. But not alone. In her room, crouched in front of the long, low cabinet beneath her dormer window, she snipped the buttons from Miles’s fawn chamois shirt and replaced them with handsome bone toggles. Then she wrote a note — another note; the one in The Kill-Gloom Gazette had indeed been hers — to Leo.

A movie night was scheduled for Friday at Tamarack State, she knew. Eudora would be safely off with Irene, occupied as she always was, while Miles had earlier mentioned that he had a meeting that night. He was expecting her to drive him, but that wasn’t much of a problem. Swiftly she finished writing and addressed an envelope with Leo’s name and room number, forgetting in her rush to add “Tamarack State Sanatorium”—an omission that would stall her letter for two days while an irritated postal clerk checked the registration lists of the several sanatoria. With a little brass key she then opened the cabinet door, bending at the same time to block the wave of paper spilling out. Drawings, her drawings — far more than anyone, even Eudora, knew about. Sometimes she forgot, herself, how many there were. Carefully she selected the best of them: Leo smiling, Leo dreaming, Leo thinking, speaking, reading. She stacked them on a piece of brown wrapping paper and then added the book Miles had given her, which she believed Leo might like, and the refurbished shirt.

Time was passing, Miles was waiting — he was walking down to the corner now, already looking for her — but still she contemplated the parcel. Her truest self, she thought, had been muffled by the Naomi who lied to her mother and the one who waited on Miles. That was fear. That was what fear could do. She’d been afraid that Leo could never learn to love her, and then Miles and her mother had arranged to keep her away from him. As soon as that happened, she could see that he already did —if not love her, exactly, then something close to that. If they were to head together for New York, his home, it wouldn’t take long before she found a way to take care of him.

Before she could even propose this, though, she had to give back what she’d taken from him. She could see, now, that this was no way to start; everything had to be honest between them and she needed to bring it back and ask him to forgive her. Then she could give him her drawings, and the warm handsome shirt, along with something to read that he couldn’t have afforded himself and that would signal how much she believed in him. In a week or two she’d propose her plan, and then…She added the pencil to the pile, folded the paper around it, and tied the parcel with a string. Knowing how late she was, but hoping that Miles would still be busy, she ran out to the car and drove back to the village.

At first she didn’t see him. He wasn’t on the steps or at the door; she ran inside but he wasn’t there either. Quickly she pushed her letter into the mail slot and then ran outside again. To the left of the steps, beyond the door to the pharmacy, was a stone bench and there, as she paused at the bottom of the steps, she finally found him. Instead of yelling at her, as she’d feared, he rose stiffly and waited for her to bring the car alongside and open the passenger door.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you waiting long?”

He coughed and leaned his head back against the seat.

“Are you all right?”

“One hour,” he said quietly. “One hour I’ve been here, when I should have been resting. Why do you do this to me?”

ON THAT FRIDAY night, May 11—it’s not surprising we remember the date — we filled the dining hall. By “we” we mean, here, not just the group who’d been gathering on Wednesdays but all one hundred and twenty of us, less the seven — three women, four men — lying upstairs in the infirmary, and with the addition of a handful of the evening staff and doctors. Not until after eight o’clock, when the last daylight faded from the windows, could we hope to see the screen, which two of the maintenance crew had hung on the front wall. Outside the tree frogs were racketing and the air smelled green, while inside we were reveling in our rare freedom; only during holiday parties and these occasional movie nights were we allowed to break the rigid segregation of the men’s and women’s tables. Now the tables had been herded toward the walls and the chairs that usually surrounded them were curved in concentric rows facing the screen. Men and women might sit where they liked, with favored friends or cousins. Those of us who’d made dates with acquaintances we hoped might turn into cousins arrived early and scrambled for seats; women had put on lipstick and done their hair while men had ironed their shirts, and we wore shoes instead of slippers. The night began with the air of a party.