Chapter 36

t was tragic. Sara could never look back on her college graduation without feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness and regret.

Two nights before they were set to graduate, Lola came home hysterical and crying that “Something happened to Lonnie!” They were supposed to meet that night at the duck pond and Lonnie had never shown up. Lola had hiked to a pay phone and called his mother, who told her Lonnie had left to meet her hours ago.

“I have to borrow your car!” Lola shouted at Mel, but she shook her head and said, “Lola, you need to calm down. You can’t go anywhere as upset as you are. Why don’t you sit down a minute and get hold of yourself and let us make a few phone calls?” They took her upstairs and had her lie down with a wet cloth across her eyes. Sara had never seen her so upset. When they went back downstairs, Sara said to Mel, “What do we do now?”

“Nothing,” Mel said firmly. “We sit tight and wait.”

Sara got up, went into the kitchen, and called the county hospital but no one matching Lonnie’s description had been admitted. She felt, in some way, responsible for Lonnie. They had become allies, of a sort. The first time Lola brought Lonnie home, Sara had been shocked at her boldness. They had been walking in the woods (there were leaves in Lola’s hair) and she’d decided on a whim that she just had to introduce him to her friends. That night. Which was insane because Lola shouldn’t even be seen out with Lonnie, much less bring him home, where they were sure to be discovered. But you could see, looking at Lola, that she wasn’t thinking clearly. She was crazy in love.

Mel, Sara, and Annie were sitting in the living room watching Laugh-In and trying not to show their shock and dismay over Lonnie. Lola took Lonnie into the kitchen. Mel was upset—she was all for breaking Lola and Lonnie up—but Sara and Annie wouldn’t agree. They figured it was Lola’s business who she loved, not theirs.

It was then that they heard a car door slam and Sara just had time to call out a warning to Lola in the kitchen before Briggs burst through the front door.

For a moment no one said anything. The canned laughter in the background rose and fell. Annie stirred and said to Briggs, “Have you ever heard of knocking?”

Briggs ignored her. His face was flushed with color, and he was breathing hard.

“Where’s Lola?” he asked.

Before anyone could answer, Lonnie walked out of the kitchen.

“Who’s he?” Briggs said, pointing a thick, hairy finger at Lonnie.

Lonnie moved forward but before he could take another step, Sara jumped up and grabbed his hand. “He’s my boyfriend,” Sara said to Briggs. “Lonnie.”

They stood there staring at each other. The air in the room got heavy and thick. Sara tugged on Lonnie’s hand and tried to lead him upstairs. At first he resisted, his eyes fixed on Briggs’s face, but then he let her pull him up the stairs behind her.

Sara closed her bedroom door and locked it, and they sat on the bed for a while, talking in low voices. “I hope you and Lola have a plan,” Sara said.

“We do. It’s not one I like, but I’m trying to keep her happy. I’d just as soon tell him now and get it over with, but she says we have to wait.”

“I can see how you two feel about each other, anyone can see it, but Briggs Furman is an asshole. You need to be careful.”

“Yeah. That’s what she says.” He ran his hand wearily over his face, and Sara could see suddenly what Lola saw in him. He had a gentle way about him. She could imagine him bringing home stray dogs or swerving to miss a turtle in the road. And he was cute, too, in a thin, boyish way, not like Briggs with his all-American quarterback good looks, but attractive. He had the smoldering intensity of a poet, a mixture of shyness and passion that women always found captivating.

They talked quietly together for a while and when Sara heard Lola’s door click shut, she put her finger to her lips and rose, motioning for him to follow her. He stood for a moment in the hallway outside Lola’s door and Sara had to tug hard on his hand to get him to move. The house below was dark. She let him out and locked the door behind him, watching through the glass as he walked off into the moonlight, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped once and looked up at the house, before turning and stepping into the shadows.

Behind her, Briggs said, “How come I’ve never met him?”

She jumped and swung around, her hand on her chest. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, a dark, menacing shape. “Goddamn it, Briggs, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Why don’t I know him?”

Her heart pounded in her chest. “He doesn’t go to Bedford. He’s a local boy.”

“That’s what I thought. A Tucker Town boy. You can do better.”

“Well, you know Briggs, it’s really none of your business who I date.”

“It’s my business if you bring him over here. I don’t like strange men in the house.”

Fear prickled her scalp. She wanted to go to bed but she didn’t want to push past him to go up the stairs. She didn’t want to put herself within distance of those long, powerful arms. Not that she thought he would hit her. It was more of an implied threat, a feeling of physical power barely restrained, a sense that here in this darkened room he could do whatever he wanted to her.

She forced herself to walk toward him as if nothing was wrong. “Good night, Briggs,” she said.

He said nothing, and she pushed past him, and went up the stairs to bed.

Sara called the hospital again thirty minutes later to check on Lonnie, but no one matching his description had been admitted. At nine o’clock Maureen showed up. She asked for Lola and then went upstairs. When they came down a few minutes later, Lola’s face was pale and swollen from crying but she appeared calm. “I have to go with my mother,” she told them. “I’ll be back in a little while.” She followed Maureen outside to a long dark car that was parked at the curb. Maureen had apparently hired a driver. The whole thing seemed odd to Sara.

An hour later, Lonnie’s mother called looking for Lola. She was crying. Lonnie had been in an accident. He was in the hospital, and she was on her way over there now. Sara hung up and gave the news to Mel and Annie.

“I’m going to the hospital,” Sara said.

“I’m going with you,” Annie said.

Mel was strangely quiet. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the keys to her car, and tossed them to Sara. On the ride over they were both silent, caught up in their own thoughts. Sara had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wondered if Lola and Maureen had been on their way to the hospital to see Lonnie, if they had somehow managed to get word early that he’d been injured.

But when she and Annie got to the hospital, Lola wasn’t there. Lonnie’s mother sat in the waiting room, surrounded by a small group of family and friends, her face swollen and tearstained. She told Sara and Annie what she knew. Lonnie’s truck had been forced off the road and he’d been attacked. He had three broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a skull fracture. He was in a medically induced coma, and no one could see him, but Sara did manage to catch a glimpse of him through the glass. His face, beneath the covering of bandages, was unrecognizable.

She and Annie sat through the night with Lonnie’s mother, who kept crying and asking repeatedly, Who would do such a thing to my boy? a question that made Sara increasingly uncomfortable because as the night wore on and Lola failed to show, it didn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible.

Over the next few years, Sara gradually managed to piece together what had happened that night. Maureen had basically kidnapped Lola, although how she managed to entice Lola into the car remained unclear (perhaps she told her she had knowledge of Lonnie’s whereabouts). The driver was a doctor Maureen had known since her days in the governor’s mansion, and he had driven them to a very exclusive hospital in Virginia, the kind of place the general public doesn’t know about, a four-star asylum where the privileged classes go to recover from drug addiction and nervous breakdowns. Lola was there for two months. She never made it to graduation (Briggs was also noticeably absent, allegedly doing charity work in Venezuela). One week after getting out of the hospital, Lola and Briggs were married in a small private ceremony in Dublin. Annie, Mel, and Sara weren’t invited.

Lonnie eventually recovered, although he was in the hospital for nearly four months. Two weeks after getting out, he moved to Alaska to work on the pipeline with his uncle. What else was there for him? By then Lola had married Briggs and was on an extended European honeymoon. Lonnie’s mother had unexpectedly come into some money and she moved to Panama City, where she bought a house on the beach near one of her sisters.

Sara lost track of Lonnie after that. Lola never mentioned him and Sara never asked. From time to time over the years, remembering that night they had spent in pleasant conversation in her bedroom, she would Google his name to see if anything came up, but nothing ever did.

Sara moved to Charlotte in June, and by November she’d decided to apply to law school. Her job as a paralegal entailed mostly real estate work, reviewing contracts and shopping center leases and attending closings, but she spent as much time as possible helping out in the litigation department. It was there that she thought she might eventually like to work. The firm was midsized, with a good mix of young partners and associates, so it felt more like a trendy boutique firm than a stodgy, old-fashioned one. In the evenings, she and a few of the staff would go out for drinks, and on the weekends she would go to parties or out to dinner with one of the vast number of eligible young men who seemed to congregate in Charlotte, the corporate banking center of the Southeast. Some nights she stayed home and watched movies on the VCR.

She wasn’t lonely. She liked being in a place where no one knew her. She could reinvent herself anyway she chose, and she did, adopting a slightly more outgoing persona than the one she’d been born with. She still talked to Mel quite a bit (she’d gone up to visit her in July) and occasionally to Annie. She and the long-suffering Mitchell were scheduled to get married in September, and Sara and Mel were flying in as bridesmaids.

Once, not long after she moved to Charlotte, she had called Lola at the hospital and Lola, obviously out of it, had answered and said, “Sara? What happened?” But the next time she called, Maureen had answered the phone and in a wooden voice had claimed that Lola wasn’t available. She was recovering from a nervous breakdown, and the doctors had decided it best that she not have any outside contact, at least not until she was well again. When she called Mel to tell her, Mel had said curtly, “What is it you think we can do? We can’t drive to the hospital and kidnap her. She signed the papers.”

“What makes you think she signed the papers?”

“Well,” she said stiffly, “she would have to, wouldn’t she? She’s of legal age. They couldn’t keep her against her will.”

“I wouldn’t put it past Maureen and Briggs to have figured out a way.” “Oh, come on, Sara! You’re the one who should be writing novels.” After Lola returned from Europe, she called Sara several times. She had missed Annie’s wedding, and seemed to feel a desperate need to reconnect with her college roommates. She and Briggs were living in Birmingham not too far from Lola’s mother. The conversations were awkward and stilted because each time Lola sounded like she was heavily medicated. She was vague and jumped around from topic to topic, and Sara had a hard time following her.

Sara hadn’t heard from J.T. Radford but as the cold winter days gave way to spring, she thought about him from time to time. The last time she’d seen him had been at graduation and he’d been standing under a chestnut tree talking to Mel. She’d had her head tilted away from him, a stony expression on her face, and he was pleading with her—you could see it in the stiff way he held his shoulders, in the desperate expression on his face—but you could also see she wasn’t listening, she was already gone, too unattached and distant for him to ever win her back.

And then, in May, Sara ran into him in a bar in Southend. It was the same week she heard that she’d been accepted into law school, and she was out with some colleagues from work celebrating.

She was coming back from the bathroom when she heard a male voice behind her say, “Sara?”

And there he was, even better-looking than she remembered, more filled out than he had been when she saw him last. “What are you doing here?” she said, still trying to figure the odds of running into him in a bar in Charlotte.

He laughed and hugged her. “Probably the same thing you are.”

“No,” she said, stepping back. “I mean, what are you doing in Charlotte?”

“I live here. I teach at a boys’ school out by Huntersville.”

She shook her head, unable to believe that he lived here, where she’d decided to settle, where she’d decided to start over. Mel didn’t know where he was. Or at least, she said she didn’t. She’d told Sara she never talked to him anymore. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said, smiling.

“Annie and Lola got married.” She was rambling.

“Really? Who are the lucky guys?”

“Mitchell and Briggs.”

“Well, that figures.”

She was nervous suddenly that she would say the wrong thing. Don’t mention Mel, she thought. “Do you ever talk to Mel?” she said.

He glanced behind her, his smile tightening. “No,” he said.

Embarassed, she lifted her hand and pointed vaguely across the bar. “My friends are waiting for me.”

He glanced at them over her shoulder. “I can see that.” He put his hand out to her and she took it, awkwardly. “It’s good to see you.” She turned around to leave but he held on to her. “Sara?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to call you sometime. Maybe we can go out and have a drink and talk about the good old days.”

She thought, Don’t do this. She said, “My number’s in the book.”

Why had she told him that? Why had she said she’d go out with him when the last thing she wanted to do was hear him talk about Mel? (The good old days.) And why had she acted like a fucking robot when she saw him, like the old Sara, not like the new persona she had tried so carefully and meticulously to invent?

She spent the next week in a panic that he would call, jumping each time the phone rang. But by the middle of the second week, when she still hadn’t heard from him, she’d begun to feel jilted, and by the end of the second week she’d decided that she wouldn’t take his call even if it came.

But of course she did take it. “Sorry,” he said. “My dad’s been sick. I’ve been out of town.”

He took her to a restaurant down on South Tryon. It was a beautiful evening, warm and balmy. A thin sliver of moon hung over the city, and the trees along the street had been strung with strings of white lights. They sat in a bricked courtyard drinking Coronas under the stars. J.T told her about his job teaching well-heeled prep school boys and she told him about her job as a paralegal, and how she’d been accepted into law school in the fall. Neither one mentioned Mel.

Afterward, they walked to Amos Music Hall. J.T. held her hand and she walked beside him feeling like an actress in a stage play This couldn’t be her. This couldn’t be her life. Every time he touched her, she felt her heart flutter inside her chest like a flock of birds taking flight.

They danced until one o’clock in the morning, and then he took her home. Despite her body’s traitorous reactions, she tried not to believe that this was anything more than a casual date. Two friends getting together after a long absence. She told herself she didn’t care if she ever saw him again. She steeled herself not to feel anything for him. At the door, he kissed her.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said.

“I can’t,” she said, feeling as if the ground had opened up and she was falling, floating like a feather. “I’m seeing someone.”

“Oh, really? What’s his name?”

She stood there for a moment, trying to think of someone, and when she couldn’t, he grinned and kissed her again.

Their second date was to a movie, their third was a picnic, and their fourth was a pool party at one of the partner’s houses. Sara hadn’t really wanted to go, but she’d mentioned it to J.T. on the phone and he’d said, “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun.”

He stayed close to her side the whole evening except for when he went up to the bar to get their drinks. It was hard not to notice him. All the other men were dressed in polo shirts and madras plaid slacks, as if they’d been produced in the same bright, shiny factory, but he was dressed in jeans and flip-flops. When he went up to the bar, all the women from work flocked around her.

“Who in the world is that gorgeous guy?”

“Where have you been keeping him?”

“Does he have a brother?”

Across the yard, J.T. saw her and waved. She smiled and waved back.

Later, as the sun began to set and the party got more raucous, they went for a swim. The Beach Boys sang on the stereo. The water was cool and silky. Sara liked the feel of it against her skin. Someone turned the pool lights on and she dived and followed J.T. down to the deep end, where the shadows were longer. He surfaced under the diving board, putting his arms up to grab the board so that he hung there with his torso above the water. She surfaced beside him, clinging to the edge of the pool.

“You like most of these people, do you?” he asked.

“They’re okay.” She liked the way the muscles in his arms tensed as he held the board.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, and she blushed suddenly and said, “Nothing.”

“Oh, I think you are.” He let go of the board and slid into the water, moving toward her with the lower part of his face submerged. Water beaded and glistened in his hair. She turned and rested both elbows on the lip of the pool, letting her feet trail behind her. He slid up beside her and gently disengaged her from the side of the pool, pulling her into his arms. He put his knee up and she rested there like a child, her arms around his neck while he kissed her, slowly and deeply.

So far they hadn’t slept together but Sara knew it was coming, not because he wanted it but because she did. Her desire was a hollow feeling beneath her heart. When he touched her she trembled as if she might break, because despite the boys she had dated in high school and the bad reputation she’d gained from running with Mel Barclay, despite the fact that she was pretty and modern and had dated a fair number of boys in college and out, she still felt inexperienced in the ways of love.

She had been saving herself all along, it would seem, for him.

It was a summer of perfect love. That’s how she would remember it in the years to come. She had never been in love before, and now she was, and it was perfect. By the middle of July she had moved in with him. She kept her apartment, but it was more or less a storage facility now, a place where she kept furniture, and kitchen utensils, and out-of-season clothes. Her toothbrush, her cosmetics, her hair dryer she took to J.T.’s house along with some of her clothes. He never told her he loved her, but he made her happy and that was enough for her.

Or at least she told herself it was.

•  •  •

She was there with him the morning Mel called from New York. It was a cold, rainy day in early September. The phone rang and he answered it. She rolled over in bed, struggling toward consciousness, but by then he had already risen, the phone clutched in his hands. She heard his voice change, heard him say “Rough night,” as he went into the bathroom and closed the door, and she knew he was talking to Mel.

When she asked him later who he was talking to he’d said, “Nobody,” and when Mel called her at home, Sara had asked innocently, “How long since you spoke to J.T.?” and Mel had lied. She knew then that they still loved each other. It was only a matter of time before they reconciled. She had been a fool to think he could ever love her, to think he could ever love anyone but Mel.

She carried this knowledge around inside her until she couldn’t bear the weight of it any longer. Then she sat down and wrote J.T. a note explaining why she couldn’t see him again, and, packing up the few possessions she had kept at his house, she left the note on the bed, got into her car, and drove out of his life.