How could you say what was deep in your heart, how? What was in your heart could never be said, because it was what you were inside of, you yourself.

“Why would he ask, why would he,” she said to them gathered around her offering comfort or a hankie. “Why.”

That was about the last thing she remembered, those tears, and the sense of a rolling wave carrying her will-lessly elsewhere. She had turned into a robot or zombie, a rogue beast who went on saying and doing things even though she, Kit, had fled or been voided. Said some pretty funny stuff too, according to Jackie. Anyway before she got sick.

“You remember getting sick?” he asked her.

“No.” She was in his bed; he sat at the end of it, wearing a college sweatsuit and a boy’s Indian-patterned robe. Light that must be dawn was in his window below the shade.

“Oh yeah,” he said, smiling. “Hugging the old toilet. Yes.” He pointed out a japanned wastebasket at the bed’s end: he’d put it there for her when everything that she could puke had been puked and she was still heaving. And looking at it she had a memory or recurrence, and a deep revulsion swept her.

“Oh God.”

“Went on quite a time.”

He seemed pretty pleased with her, or with himself. Suddenly she shuddered, and yanked aside the covers, as though suspecting something was in the bed with her.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “No need.”

She was still fully clothed, except for her shoes and sweater. He pointed at her jeans.

“I think I could have got them off you,” he said. “But I don’t think I could have got them back on you again. So you can see, you’re safe.”

“Oh jeez.”

“I shared the bed with you,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d mind that, seeing as how it’s my bed, and the only one.”

“No,” she said. “No, jeez, Jackie.” She hugged his pillow, laying herself carefully down, a jug of ill humors she wanted not to spill. “I guess that wasn’t quite the date you were expecting.”

“Well, I have to admit…”

“I thought maybe too. I really did,” she said. He had been so far always polite and patient with her about that, or impatient in a comic and harmless way. He seemed to think of her as skittish and virginal, which maybe she was. Anyway she let him regard her that way, unable to tell him of the cold dread or repugnance that gripped her when he smiled and caressed her, and what the reason might be. “You know I’m not sure I can ever, I mean…”

“Well,” he said. “So long as you’re not sure.” He smoked a cigarette and watched her. “Now we got another thing to think about,” he said, “and that’s getting you back into your dorm.”

He must have seen a dreadful understanding dawn in her eyes then, because he nodded solemnly at her: yes it’s true.

“Oh God, I never got back into the dorm.”

“No, you didn’t. Not exactly in any shape to.”

“They’ll know. They check. They tell your parents.”

“You had a good excuse. The weather was real bad. Ice on the roads. Dangerous.”

“No! I’ve got to get back in, I’ve got to now. Maybe they didn’t check after all, maybe just this once. Oh God.” She tried to leap from the bed but the contents of her self seemed to slide or slop hideously when she tried. She had to sit again and hold still till her seas stopped heaving. “Oh help me.”

Now he began to laugh, as he had not done so far. “Well you got the whole experience, you really did. Including the part where you do something dumb, and the part where you only figure it out the next day.”

“Oh stop, stop.”

“And the part where you want to die.”

She had got up and begun to make her way to the bathroom in a crippled crouch, holding the backs of chairs and the edge of the bureau, that made him laugh more. “You help, just help,” she murmured. “You find my shoes.”

She would have made it out of the house, determined to move and keep moving, except that she had to pass through the kitchen, the ashtrays filled with twisted butts and the sink with dishes and the table where, shockingly, the empty gin bottle still held court, its prissy lying label the last straw. She spent more time in the toilet, Jackie speaking soothingly and encouragingly to her through the door, though she wouldn’t let him in.

“The proctor has left you a couple of notes,” Fran told her. “She seemed pretty concerned.”

“Oh God.”

“You look bad. Very bad.”

“Don’t say anything, don’t let her know I’m here till I wash. Please don’t.”

“Hey,” Fran said, by which she seemed to mean reassurance, and solidarity, and sweet reason, and goes-without-saying, all in a tiny non-word. Kit went to stand under the feeble shower, wishing she could wash inside as well as out. Then when she was freshly dressed she went to the proctor’s door, thinking hard about how to put her hopeless case.

The proctor’s face stilled her: stricken and tender at once. “Your parents called,” she said. “They’ve been calling. They want you to call right back. I didn’t know where you were.” She wore a terry-cloth robe cinched with a belt. She was only a couple of years older than Kit. “Here,” she said. “Use the phone here.” And she pushed a chair up to the phone on its table, and touched Kit’s shoulder to make her sit there before it.

11.

It had been an accident with some ammunition, some shells being transported: that’s what the letter said that had been sent to George and Marion. Ben had been stationed in the Philippines, and on a routine training mission this thing had happened. They didn’t describe it in any way that could be pictured. They said he had died instantaneously. Two members of his outfit were accompanying his body home and would have more to tell them.

She tried not to cry out, tried with her strength, somehow thinking that if she could keep from crying out she would keep it from being true. But she did, she cried out, and it was as though the cry would break her in pieces, shake her to the ground like a bombed building.

“I’ll come get you,” George called to her over the phone, so far away. “I’m leaving in a few minutes. It’s still raining, Kit, and it might take me a while, but I’ll come.”

The rain went on through the day, never quite turning back to snow, but coating the trees and telephone lines with ice, the new green tips of branches too, how could they survive that, they always did. George driving her north on the highway held the wheel in both hands; when some invisible frontier was crossed and the wet road turned to ice, the cars before him in the twilight began to stop or try to and he had to brake, and the great station wagon spun slowly around and onto the shoulder before coming to a stop. He opened the door and was halfway out when he stopped and sat again and began to sob. The falling rain darkened the felt of the hat on his bent head. They both wept there. A police cruiser stopped beside them, lights going, to ask if they were all right.

That night she lay in her bed, so near her father’s and mother’s that she could hear them stir and talk; could hear even the click of the lamp coming on, then going off again. Her mother’s tears. She lay and looked up into the darkness of the ceiling and listened. Just please let her sleep, she thought or prayed. Just let her sleep. You bastard.

This stormlike grief. It wasn’t the hollowed, blank grief that she had felt after Our Lady, like being scraped out to the rind. This grief was something and not nothing, it rose continually to sweep over you, making you sob or cry out unexpectedly, to lose your footing even, like a riptide. Marion coming out of the church behind his aluminum casket must have felt it come over her, for she moaned and stumbled and George could hardly hold her upright.