went on, “the parts boys can touch if you’re engaged or at least pinned, and the parts they can’t touch till you’re married. Everybody knows the map. But boys try anyway, because that’s what boys do, because we say no. Boys try, girls deny. That’s the dance.”
I stopped, tapping my cigarette out the window. The air smelled cooler—summer rain on the way, I thought. Finn sat silent.
“My brother was one of those soldiers who didn’t adjust too well to being home. And by that I mean he ate a shotgun.” Brains and blood splattered everywhere, a neighbor had said incautiously, not realizing I was in earshot to hear the gory details my parents had kept from me. I’d run inside and vomited, not able to shake that terrible image from my eyes. “My parents were . . . I came home from Bennington early that semester, so I could take care of them.” Bringing my mother flowers, tying my father’s tie for him, making burned meat loaf when it was clear no one else could manage Sunday lunch. Trying anything at all that would help fix how terribly broken they’d become.
“After the winter holidays, I finally had to go back to school, and when I didn’t have anyone to take care of anymore, I just—stopped, like a broken clock. I couldn’t feel anything. I was dead inside. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. I’d just lie there thinking about James and Rose and my parents, and then back to James again. Crying and crying.”
It was around then that I’d started seeing Rose everywhere. Little girls with bouncing braids turned into the young Rose, tall sorority girls sauntering off to class turned into the older Rose—I saw her everywhere, superimposed on the faces of complete strangers. I imagined her so often I started thinking that I was going crazy . . . Or that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t dead.
“I lost my brother,” I said hoarsely. “I failed him. If I’d just been able to help when he was falling to pieces, maybe he wouldn’t have died like that. I wasn’t going to lose my cousin too, if there was any chance she was alive. I was already blowing off all my classes—I couldn’t drag myself out of bed for algebra, but I could do it for Rose. I wrote letters, telephoned people, talked to refugee bureaus. I’d worked so many summers in my father’s law office, I knew what kind of overseas calls to make, what kinds of papers to ask for. What there was to find, I found.” That bored English clerk, telling me that the last report on Rose Fournier had been handled by one Evelyn Gardiner, currently residing at 10 Hampson Street. Digging up the original tip about Le Lethe.
Finn was silent. My cigarette was almost done. I drew a last long drag, and flicked the glowing end out the window. “You’d think someone would have contacted my parents about my skipping so much class, but no one cared. Everyone knows girls like me aren’t in college to make the dean’s list, we’re there to hang around Ivy League boys and find a husband. I didn’t date much—mostly I was the go-to double date if someone’s boyfriend had a roommate they couldn’t ditch—but around this time, I got set up on a blind date. Carl, I think his name was. Dinner and a drive-through movie. He’s got his hand under my sweater the minute the show starts. I know how this goes: we kiss awhile, and then I push him back when he goes too far. Only this time around, I just couldn’t see the point. I was too numb to go through the whole song and dance. I wondered what it would be like if I just—went along. I didn’t like Carl all that much, but I thought maybe he’d make me . . . feel something.” Something that wasn’t guilt or pain, anyway. It hadn’t worked out that way; it had just been more numbed, empty nothing. “Carl kept giving me startled looks afterward. He couldn’t believe I didn’t stop him. Good girls didn’t do that, and I was a good girl.”
Nothing from Finn. I wondered if I disgusted him.
“He asked me out the next week. I said yes. It hadn’t been anything special the first time, but everyone knows the first time is terrible. I hoped maybe it would get better.” Still just more nothing. “He probably talked to the