IX
Sara
Sara was back to visit, camping on the old place. Two summers had come and gone before she could get free for a few weeks to come back. She had finished her thesis and gotten her degree, but she wanted to return and see what had happened to the human beings she had been studying, and even more compelling: she wanted to find out what had happened to Henry and Mary. She found out that the regional hospital where Mary had been taken had closed down and Mary had been moved with the other patients to another facility closer to Sara’s own territory. She also heard that Henry was out of prison and wandering around, didn’t go back to his home. She found this out from Robert when she stopped at the same truck stop coming in where she’d met the trooper going out all those years earlier. Sara asked the waitress about Mary and was directed to where Robert was working and he told her more than she really needed to know.
“I know you feel bad about your part in what happened to Henry and Mary, but I thought you should know that it was all for the best. Henry couldn’t take care of that girl by himself and she is better off in the hospital.”
Sara wanted to say that nobody was better off in an institution but she thought she should be careful about what she said.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know them.”
“Thought you might of interviewed Henry for your book.”
“No, Henry didn’t want to be interviewed. He was actually kind of hostile, but I’m sure he had his reasons. It wasn’t my way to intrude.”
“But sometimes you can’t help it, intruding I mean, interfering in other people’s lives. Most folks be better off if they just realized that fact and didn’t fight it so much.”
“Well I certainly did not intend to.”
“The question is: did you intend NOT to? That’s what I mean.”
Sara was shocked at how Robert read her. She had regretted so much her part in what happened to those two folks. Because of her, Henry and Mary had both been caught in systems. Henry was out now but Mary would never get out and Henry couldn’t save her; he didn’t have a clue how to start. Even though she knew she should cut their conversation short, she told Robert she was staying little more than an hour away from the new regional hospital and would go see if Mary was OK, if they were treating her well, and then she was afraid she shouldn’t have told even that much to Robert. He asked her a lot of questions where she was staying and she answered vaguely, but she knew if he wanted to find her he could ask in Paint Bank or Sweet Springs or even Gap Mills; they all knew her.
Of course Mary didn’t respond to Sara’s strange visit, but she was quiet and stared calmly at Sara as Sara sat looking at her. Sara talked a little first until she realized it was useless and then she just sat resting in Mary’s peaceful sad stare; eyes looking into eyes yearning for woods. She knew that Mary missed the damp matted leaves laced with the occasional fragrance of laurel or hemlock borne on the breeze, the sound of the stream rushing over rocks and the sun making bright patterns on the trees. Both women felt these things in the deepest parts of their souls, buried in Sara, silenced in Mary. Sara knew from Robert how Henry used to squirt the milk warm from the cow into Mary’s mouth and Mary made those sounds of pleasure she’d forgotten in the hospital and Sara couldn’t smell the lactating herds of dairy cattle without feeling bad about Mary and thus, she felt what Henry felt even though she’d long forgotten his face.