"I'll manage."
"Well, chances are you would, but here's the thing, your mother was going to do this first and I stopped her, said I didn't think it was such a good idea. So if I mess it up, you know who'll be raising hell."
I nodded my head. He was right. I got good at doing things for myself, once the leg could stand to be jostled around a bit, but in my first week home I was dependent. I needed help. "Get out of these," my father said.
I lifted up my hips and he pulled down the bottoms of my pajamas and then carefully took them off my foot and then the cast. Then he put his arms around my chest and helped me to lower myself into the water, being careful not to get the cast wet. It wasn't hard, it didn't go much past my knee. "What in the hell is that?" my father said.
I looked over and saw him staring at my shoulder, at Cecilia's name. All the scabs had come off it while I was in the hospital. The nurses, who liked to tease me about it, took real good care to keep it clean. I thought that even as they said they didn't approve, they wouldn't have minded seeing their names on the arms of fellows they knew. "I got a tattoo," I said.
"I can see that."
"It was first liberty," I said. "We'd all been drinking."
My father sat back on his heels. "I thought about getting one of those, long time ago. Never got around to it." He looked again. "I wouldn't show your mother anytime soon, least not till she's through worrying about your knee." He smiled and shook his head. "You go off to boot camp and get yourself tattooed and get yourself shot. Most people don't do that much in a whole war."
By the time Cecilia came I was dry and dressed and sitting on the couch downstairs with my leg up. I wanted to run to her, pick her up and hold her, take her places we could be alone, tell her every thought I'd had those last ten weeks, every time I'd said her name aloud. But my mother came in with a tray of coffee and my sister Martha ran into the room to say hello. Cecilia was wearing the sweater I had given her for Christmas last year.
"I'm sorry I was so asleep when you came in last night," she said, sitting down on the edge of the couch, near my waist.
"It was late," I said.
"I barely even remember you coming in. I'd been waiting all that time and then when you finally came home I didn't even wake up all the way."
"I was pretty tired myself." I wanted to kiss her.
She looked at my cast for a minute, tapped the plaster lightly with one fingernail. "Does it hurt much?"
And I knew right then, though don't ask me how. She was planning on calling it off. I don't think she even knew it yet. My eyes kind of lost their focus, like she was still sitting in front of me but I couldn't quite see her anymore. "No," I said. "It's fine."
"Everybody at school's been worried. Your mom says you're coming back."
"I don't know yet. The leg's better off staying still."
"I could bring you the work," she said, and then for a second she caught my stare. It was right there. When a person has left you as many times as Cecilia left me, you could see it coming from miles away. The first thought of going makes a sound as clear as somebody saying your name. She laughed and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. "Stop that," she said, "you're embarrassing me."
"You're still wearing your ring," I said.
She held up her hand so that the stone caught the sun and let it go in little white circles around the room. "Why shouldn't I be?"
"You should be. That means we're going to get married. I want to get married now," I said. I wanted to keep saying it, like reminding her would make a difference.
Cecilia ran her finger up and down my cast. "We'll get married," she said. "Don't worry about that. Just worry about getting better. Once this is off we can talk about getting married."
"This isn't going to be off for a while," I said.
Cecilia just smiled. "What difference does it make?" she said. "We're not going anywhere."
Sometimes I try to imagine what life would have been like had I married Cecilia. I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should. If my life hadn't gone the way it did, with me finally leaving Ashland City, I never would have come to Habit. Then maybe Rose wouldn't have found someone to marry and maybe she would have given Sissy up and that was the thing that made all the events in my life up to the day she was born make sense. Before that, it hadn't come together, I hadn't been able to see things as part of something larger, the way my father would have. I could only see my own grief. But Sissy made everything worthwhile, suffering in the past, hard times ahead of us. It all made sense because it meant she stayed with us. Before, the only thing I'd wanted was a life that God did not intend for me to have. I suffered the loss of things that were never mine, a house with Cecilia, children and neighbors and anniversaries. Until I met Rose, I could never see how the whole thing fit together.
How much trouble my leg gave me exactly is hard to say, because I told everyone it gave me so much I might have come to believe it. Too much to go into town, too much to try and drive, and too much to go to school. We were in the war now, and one by one there were names in the papers that we knew or the name of someone we didn't know but who lived in the next town, or dated your cousin once, or had your same last name. These were the ones who died, whose bodies came back or didn't. Every day I read the paper I would feel ashamed all over again, not so much for being alive, but for not having taken my chances rightfully. No one ever said this to me, even gave me the smallest cause to think it was true, but I was sure that people were thinking by now that I had shot myself as a way of getting out. Some days I half wondered if I had.
I kept thinking the knee would take a turn and I would get back in. It was going to be a long war, everybody saw that now, and I thought there may still be time for me, but the knee wouldn't go along. Even when I finally got to moving around pretty well on my own, I could tell I was a long way from running off a landing craft onto a beach. Years off.
My school agreed to let me work at home, and every day Cecilia would bring me my lessons and the notes she'd taken in class. In truth, I was glad to have the work to do. It kept me busy. I was really a much better student those last months than I ever had been before. I sat at the kitchen table all day now, my leg stretched over several chairs, and I read books and worked long math problems in a notebook. My mother never bothered me. Until three o'clock every afternoon she treated me like I was in school.
Then at three Cecilia came. All day long I would watch the clock and think about where she was, in science class, in history, at lunch, walking over the school lawn, stopping to talk to a friend, winding her way slowly toward my house. At first she would get to the house quickly, half out of breath. She would tell me what everyone had said and done that day, acting out both sides of every conversation. She would hold my hand as she talked and sometimes her engagement ring would slip to one side and bite into my fingers.
But there was a war going on, and it didn't take her long to see men who had been hurt while fighting. I imagine she met men, too, ones who were just getting ready to go off. Me and my leg, stretched out in my parents' kitchen, didn't look quite as interesting, and Cecilia started to come late. Some days she didn't come, but sent somebody else instead.
Time went by slowly and winter seemed longer than I had ever remembered it being, but by the spring I was just wearing a light brace and could get around pretty well with a cane. I'd go for short walks through the neighborhood at night, waiting until it was late enough that I wouldn't have to stop and explain myself to everyone I passed. Sometimes I would stand stock-still in the driveway and shoot free throws into the hoop my father had put up on the garage when I was ten. Every time the ball went through, one of my sisters would run and catch it and bring it back to me.
Sometimes I would ask Cecilia about the wedding, but she would always say, when your cast is off or after graduation or not until you find a good job. We were breaking up, but the thing was, it wasn't like all the other
times before. We were breaking up but she wasn't leaving. Cecilia sat the closest to me when my parents were in the room, and when I went for walks she wanted to come with me. And since I wanted her, needed her more than I ever had before, I took every act of kindness as a chance that things would work out after all.
But when we were alone she'd nearly pull her hair out in frustration. By the last month of school it was all she could do to drop my books on the table and go.
"I don't know why you can't pick up your things yourself," she said one day when she was giving me a math assignment. "Everyone knows your leg is fine."
"It is?"
"You're going to sit right there for the rest of your life, let everybody else take care of you. Well, not me. I'm not going to do it."
"You think this is all a joke? You think I should go down and reenlist?"
Cecilia looked so angry. She was hugging her notebook to her chest. I watched the ring on her hand. It was always there. I hadn't seen her take it off once, not since I put it on her. "Yes," she said slowly. "That's exactly what I think."
I tensed the muscles in my leg. Tense, release, tense, release, just like the doctor told me. "I want to," I said. "There's nothing in the world I want more. It's the only thing that could make half a difference to you, so you've got to know by now that I'd do it if I could."
She wouldn't say a word. Her face was as cold as anything I'd ever seen in my life.
"What I want to know," I said quietly, because in truth a big part of me didn't want to know, "is why you keep coming around. If this whole thing is making you so crazy then why do you bother?"
"What am I going to do? Have everyone in town say I broke off my engagement because you got shot?" She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table across from me. "It's all I ever think about. People at school, my parents, they keep saying how they all know this must be so hard for you and how great I am, helping you along. I hate it, you know? I really hate it. I feel sometimes like I'm already stuck in a marriage and I'm not even married yet." Then all of a sudden she looked up and stopped talking. It was like she realized that she was saying these things to the enemy, the person she was trying to get away from. She picked up her books and left without so much as a good-bye.
This is how crazy I was: I thought, if that's the reason she's staying, at least she's staying.
The principal of our school, Mr. Franklin, came to the house to give me my exams. He seemed to understand my not wanting to come back, and so he never suggested it, even though by that point everyone knew I could have returned to classes. "I've been going over your work, Son," he said, bringing out a file of papers I'd written. My mother put a cup of coffee down on the table for him and then left the room, even though it was clear she wanted to stay. Mr. Franklin spooned two sugars into his coffee. "I think you should consider college. You've done very well, now that you've stopped concentrating on athletics."
It's nothing but sheer vanity that makes me say this. Rose, I bet, would laugh if I told her that someone once said that I should go to college. But Mr. Franklin did.
The weekend before graduation it turned fiercely hot out of nowhere. Late May, nobody could figure it out. My mother was up in the attic getting down the last of the summer clothes, packing the sweaters away in mothballs. My father was working a lot, because that's the busy time of year for contracting. Cecilia came by when she knew my family was going to be around, because she'd come to a point where the idea of being alone with me was more than she could stand. As much as I tried to figure out what to do about it all, I couldn't. The truth is, I had started to hate her a little. I looked forward to her visits less and less. I was feeling half as trapped by the whole thing as she was. But it never occurred to me that I could have come not to want her. That wasn't the way it worked between us. I wanted her and she decided. That was the way things went.
So on that hot Saturday when she showed up at the house and found me on the couch reading, I'd just as soon she hadn't come at all. I wanted to find out what was going to happen in the next chapter, and she was working so hard to make it clear to me that she was sorry she was with me that I was half ready to throw the book at her. Then my father came in and said to her, "Cecilia, will you please get this boy out of the house? Take him down to the quarry, get some sun on him. He looks like the underside of a rock."
"I can't swim yet," I said. "It doesn't sound like much fun."
"You don't have to swim," my father said. "Just get some air, get out. Take the station wagon. Cecilia can drive you."
Cecilia looked at me, told me in her way, get me out of this. "That sounds like a good idea," she said.
"Cecilia doesn't have her suit," I said.
"So she'll borrow one from Martha. You're sounding like an old man, Son. You can't spend your whole life indoors."
So Cecilia went up to my sister's room and put her swimsuit on and then put her clothes back on top. I had to ride in the backseat with my leg up because my knee still didn't take to being bent. I waited for her in the car and when she got in she didn't say anything and I didn't say anything, she just drove to the quarry.
What I remember best was the heat. It felt good, the way the first few hot days will after a long, wet spring. The sun seemed to go right into your bones and work the winter out of you. I spread a blanket out on the ground and tossed my book down. Everything took me twice as long then, and Cecilia only stood there and watched. "I can't believe nobody's here," she said. "A day like this."
"It's early," I said. I pulled my shirt off over my head and stretched out on the ground. Cecilia took off her dress and stood there for a minute in my sister's bathing suit, which was too big for her. "What's that on your arm?" she said, leaning closer.
It was her name. I had never told her about the tattoo. I figured I would show it to her on our wedding night.
"Jesus," she said, reading it over and over again. "How could you have done that?"
"It was when I was in boot camp. I was drunk."
"Jesus." She walked away, toward the water. "Does anybody know about it?"
"My father's seen it, the guys in boot camp, a couple of nurses. That's about it."
"Your father's seen this? I can't believe you. Who would do a stupid thing like that?"
"It wasn't a stupid thing. We were getting married, I was in love. I got a tattoo." I started to stand up, but I don't know why.
"Stay there," she said, her voice full of anger. "Don't talk to me. Don't look at me." She walked into the water and then turned around again. "That's my name," she said. "You can't just go putting it wherever you want." And then she was gone, underwater, swimming out toward the center of the quarry.
I looked at her name for a while, tried to remember what I had been thinking that night. I loved her. I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That's the way it is, when you've loved somebody your whole life. It's like a direction you go in, even when you don't want to go anymore. I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. I listened to the sound of Cecilia's even strokes through the water and occasionally the sound of her diving from one of the rocks and thought, she'll stay out there her whole life rather than come onto dry land with me.
I read for a while and then lay on my stomach to watch Cecilia swim. She had been out there a long time. I don't know if an hour had passed, or two, but my skin was tight and red and I shaded my eyes with my hand to watch her dive. I thought that she must have gone down deep because she didn't come up. Then she did, came up and flipped her wet yellow hair aside and waved her hand and I started to wave to her. I couldn't remember if I was angry at her at that moment or not, and then she was gone again, back under the water. I found my cane and stood up. My leg was stiffer for lying still. Again she came up and her head was thrown back and her neck was long and wet in the midday light and smeared with a bright streak of red coming down from her forehead. Her mouth made one terrible round O. She was pulling air in, as much as s
he could get before going down again, which she did. The water set itself right almost immediately, smoothing over the place she had been so quick it was like nothing was going on at all. Nothing was wrong. It was like watching something very far away, something that had happened years before, even while it was happening right in front of me. She broke the surface again. She didn't make a sound, other than the splashing, because she wanted to save her lungs for taking air in, not forcing it out. Her wild eyes passed over me and suddenly I understood. That was still Cecilia and I was still here. It wasn't yet something that had happened, but something that was happening, and even as I understood this I stood there. I took a full minute to watch her suffer and watch her want me as I had wanted her all my life. Then I went into the water with my shoes and pants and brace.
The leg pulled down, but I was swimming. I did not see Cecilia. She had said as much with her eyes, that that had been her last time up. I dove down, let the weight of the leg carry me, and felt along the bottom in darkness. Huge rocks jutted up and I traced around them with my hands. The water made its own world, and I remember thinking this is where I'm going to die. I pushed myself up again and breathed like Cecilia. I made sure it was the right spot and then went down to feel the silt and rocks, some branches blown in by storms. I felt the pressure of the water, the way my leg pinned me there to the bottom. I came up again and gulped the air and thought how much bigger I was than Cecilia, how much more these lungs could take in. The third time down her hand brushed my face, not at the bottom but resting on the top of some branches, and I took it and pulled it up with me, forced her head above the water as if it would make a difference and I screamed, "Somebody help me." I was pulling two weights back, Cecilia and the leg and they both wanted me under. I put one arm beneath her arms and pulled myself backward, calling again and again until someone called back. A family I could barely see crested the hill when we were still twenty feet out and by the time the man had made it to the edge of the water, we were pretty much there. He only had to get wet up to his knees pulling us in.