In the Night Season by Richard Bausch Page B

loneliness, its meagerness, its endless worry.
    Today, the usual heavy workload, the hours of concentration that had been required of her, had served to deaden the sense of unease, of trespass on her privacy, which she now felt along with all the rest. Oh, how she had wanted to tell Ed Bishop not to come see her and Jason anymore. There was Jason’s safety to think about. She had spent a bad long day yesterday, seeing images of her son receiving harm from strangers, men who were part of a sickness she was not up to fighting. She wasn’t up to any of it. Unhappy as the realization had made her, she determined to accept the truth and to act accordingly. Mr. Bishop would understand; he had said as much, on more than one occasion. She was alone; she must think selfishly. She drove home with the conviction that she could do what she had decided must be done.
    But the moment had come, and she looked into those kind, dark eyes and heard herself convincing him to keep on…
     
    Her mother and father lived in Seattle now—one of her father’s lifelong dreams; he had spent time there when he was first in themilitary, back in 1943. They were so far away. It seemed more than the simple miles. Nora’s father was a man who kept all pacts with himself, and one of those pacts was that he would live on the edge of the Pacific after he retired from the air force.
    Sometimes Nora thought of her parents as representing the luck people in love seemed to have, everywhere she looked.
    Her last year with Jack had been so bad that she had contemplated a separation, since it had become nearly impossible to reach him, or find the way to talk to him, bring him around to being himself. She had come to suspect that it wasn’t just the business failing, or the venture into computers, which had siphoned more money away. Everything had fallen into question.
    Once, that last fall before the accident, she watched him from the window of their bedroom as, below on the sunny, leaf-littered lawn, he tossed a baseball back and forth with Jason. When Jason missed a throw and had to chase it, Jack stared off at the turning trees on the other end of the field and seemed to mutter aloud, shaking his head and facing away from the boy. She wondered what his thoughts were, what he could be saying to the air, waiting for his son to retrieve the ball.
    When he came inside, an hour later, she said, “Who were you talking to?”
    “What?” He seemed almost startled.
    “I was watching you from the window—you and Jason. Jason went to get the ball out of the forsythia bushes and you were—I don’t know. Disputing with—something. Who or what were you arguing with?”
    “Nothing,” he said. “Nobody. Are you spying on me now?”
    “Spying on you.”
    “Just leave me alone a little, can’t you? Give me some room to breathe, for Christ’s sake. I’m tired of feeling supervised all the damn time.”
    “Jack, you’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?”
    “Wrong?” he said.
    “Okay.” She turned from him.
    “No,” he said. “Wait.”
    She faced him and said nothing for a space. Then: “Well?”
    “Look, I wasn’t—you—I don’t know what you thought you saw.”
    “I love you,” she said.
    And he looked down. It was as if he did not want the subject of love broached at all. There had been times when—apart from her own growing doubt about her feeling for him—she had been ready to believe he was no longer in love with her. If it weren’t for the lovemaking. Those nights, in the room, in the quiet, when he reached for her, and they were lovers again, and he would once more be like the boy she had married, a little nervous, and tremendously careful of her, almost worshipful.
    But toward the end, even this had begun to feel detached, almost automatic.
    “Jack,” she said one night as they lay awake, not touching, “are you seeing someone else?”
    “How can you ask that?” he’d said, apparently hurt.
    “Something’s