his hip, finger tracing the length of his torso, collarbone to pelvis, shoulder to hip bone. She ran her fingers along the scar on his side, her eyes closed.
“I never worked at a sawmill,” he said.
“Huh?” She opened her eyes.
“I didn’t get it working at a sawmill.”
“I guess I figured.” She closed her eyes again. She lay very still, just the fingers, tracing.
He was quiet a long while.
He hadn’t intended to tell her. He’d intended to tell no one. But none of this was foreseeable, and circumstances dictated their own imperatives. He had sense enough to have learned that much. He had sense enough to be afraid. Afraid that to give up a secret to one person on Osprey Island was to lose that secret to the world. And it wasn’t that the walls had ears or the trees had eyes, or that the birds overhead overheard your confessions and whispered them into the wind. It was that people just couldn’t help themselves.
He felt it in himself, that desire to talk. Perhaps it was his vigilant check of that desire that kept him so unnaturally quiet much of the time. He wanted to tell her, though. He wanted to give her something he’d never given anyone: a truth, of sorts.
He had trouble understanding what truth meant. He had lived with secrets, and secrets were just lies of omission and as hard to live with as any other lie. For there was no such thing as a solitary lie. It wasn’t that lies begot more lies; the casting of one lie merely brought into focus and relief a sprawling net of other lies. Roddy had been living those lies—a whole world of them—for twenty years, which was long enough for the world of lies to become its own truth. Or reality, at least. Maybe there’d been a time when he could have acknowledged the lie and stepped away from it, stepped back into the truth, but that time was long gone. That lie was now part of a foundation upon which other things had grown, and truth and fiction were entwined, which meant that there was no such thing as truth anymore. Nor had there ever been. What Roddy had once seen as truth—the truth of his childhood, for instance, before his lie—had only seemed like truth, when, really, it was as much of a lie as everything else. It was only in lying himself that he’d learned of the nature of the structure of a lie. And now that he could see it, he could see how everything was built of lies and how the world was a city of pick-up sticks raised on quicksand.
To acknowledge his lie to Suzy may have meant a good many things, but it meant one thing very clearly to Roddy: He knew he couldn’t undo the reality spawned from the lie, couldn’t ever return to the truth he’d left behind. But he could, at least, make sure that Suzy knew the lie for what it was. He could tell her. And he started to.
He told her what it was like to turn eighteen on August 8, 1968. He told her some things she already knew: like what it was like to live in a place where certain things didn’t get questioned—if you were a man and your country went to war, then you, as a man, went to fight in that war. End of story. Unless you happened to have a mother unlike every other mother you’d ever known. A mother who swore she’d burn your draft card herself if you didn’t do it first. A woman who begged you, whatever you did, not to fight that filthy, wrong, horrible war.
Suzy listened. She understood.
Roddy’s father had been a weak man who lived by a rigid set of codes, not smart enough to face the world without them. A man who told his son: You burn that draft card, you’ll be on the next ferry off of Osprey and never coming back, you hear? A man who said: You don’t fight in that war, you’re no son of mine, while his wife screamed and cried: No son of mine is fighting in that war. You had until you turned eighteen, and that had bought Roddy time—a few months past graduation—but not peace. What they’d done was effectively demand that he choose: Your country or your mother? Your mother or your father? Roddy’d had a war waged through himself.