Chapter Thirteen
By the middle of August, the war was over.
Because it had started with killing, and because everyone knew it was going to end with killing, the fact that it had ended with the most killing of all was layered uncomfortably into the celebration.
A single bomb two thousand times stronger than any used before, dropped onto a densely populated city in Japan.
As many as a hundred thousand people dead in an instant, nearly all of them civilians.
In his radio address, Truman called it “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”
“We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely,” he said, and then listed all the things that would be obliterated.
Two days later, when no surrender came, another of these new bombs was dropped, and another densely populated city was wiped off the face of the Earth.
They were two places many in Bonhomie had never heard of before and for the rest of their lives would know only for having been destroyed so that, as teachers and schoolbooks would reiterate for generations, American and Allied lives could be saved, and the long war could finally be brought to an end.
On Taft Street, Becky was as relieved as anyone that the war was over, but troubled.
Her heart swelled, thinking of all the people who’d be returning to their families, and it deflated when she thought of all the people who’d died fighting, and all the grief that would flow out of those deaths for decades.
When she read about the atomic bombings, she gasped at the number of people who suddenly found themselves spirited—like the pictures she’d seen from Pompeii: casts of men and women holding one another, or frozen mid-crawl.
What did they all do, suddenly, without their lives?
Nothing, perhaps. They drifted and cried, not yet realizing they could be done crying.
Or they drifted and waited for bearings, not yet realizing that bearings didn’t matter anymore.
She didn’t know, knew only that the land of the living was a fractured and smoldering place at the moment, and it was leaking heavily into the other side.
In town, and on her neighborhood walks with Skip, she saw people she’d had at her table, one-timers and repeaters.
Some of them waved and even stopped to say hello, but some kept their eyes down and continued walking.
When she told Mrs. Dodson about this, Mrs. Dodson asked her if she was in it for the hellos.
No. She was in it to help people, and the last twelve months had convinced her she could do just that, if she tried.
Maybe it was the slowly growing population—the town seemed to take on a thousand people every few years—or the fact that she was becoming better known among those who might be interested in what she did, but the number of people seeking her out had remained steady, at least five or six per week.
Since grief was a byproduct of war that no one had figured out how to repurpose, she had a feeling that number might increase.
The Heaven question came up more and more.
(The Hell question almost never came up.) Was he?
Was she? Please, please say yes. Becky never would.
And while she didn’t like the frustration she sometimes saw on their faces, she wasn’t about to play into the idea that God was taking care of all the “righteous” dead up there, when He didn’t seem very interested in taking care of the living down here.
Not across the board, anyway. She was tired of wondering if her ability came from God.
If it did, it was clearly still up to her to make sure she did something worthwhile with it.
The question that rose to the top more often now was, why her?
Out of so many other people? She sometimes thought that if she had the answer to that, she wouldn’t care about where the ability came from, or the fact that her own family didn’t believe in her.
But she did care that Cal didn’t believe.
More than she wanted to. It wasn’t just his opinion of it; something in his heart wouldn’t let him believe in it, or even try.
Why? Because it took something away from him?
Because it touched something he didn’t want touched?
If ever there was a time to throw your arms around the people you loved the most, it was now, but she hadn’t been in a frame of mind to throw her arms around Cal since April.
When they heard news of the war’s end and his eyes welled up, she reached across the kitchen table and squeezed his hand, but the person she threw her arms around was Skip.
Still, their lives were moving on. She considered her practice a practice, because she was still learning how to do what she did.
She considered Cal as much a work in progress as she was.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that one day, as unlikely as it seemed, he was going to come around.
He would see his way into believing in her—and probably through no action on her part.
It was the closest thing to a premonition she’d ever had.
Their ongoing stance-taking that they were both in the right about the LaGrange incident, and that the other had overreacted and behaved unfairly, had had its place.
But they were getting along a little better, and then a little better still, and they were tired of living like two people who didn’t care for each other.
The truth was they cared for each other a great deal—around the things that angered them.
And the fight that had sent them to opposite sides of the house so many months ago began, in the weeks after the war ended, to feel like something from another time.
The world was moving forward, picking up the pieces.
They picked up the pieces. By early fall, with the open windows bringing in the crisp night air, they were back beside each other when they turned off the light.
—
Years later, she would remember how quiet he was as he settled back into their bedroom.
How she caught him shaking his head to himself more than a few times, the creases around his mouth deepening.
She would remember how rueful he seemed, for weeks.
How apologetic—even while he hadn’t apologized for anything; neither of them had.
She would remember thinking his remorse seemed to be weighing him down, and watching him slowly pull out of that. She would remember thinking—with such confidence—that it spoke well of his character.
—
Margaret was one of the many wives in town who started to show in the months following the end of the war.
Ruth was right there with her, neck and neck.
Even Brenda Rhodes—now Brenda Liddick—was in her second trimester by February.
Expectant mothers were everywhere: smiling at one another as they went about their swollen days; filling their carts at Paulson’s and Food Town because they were finally free of rationing (except for sugar); attending knitting and sewing circles to make baby clothes, now that they could buy as much yarn and cloth as they wanted.
Agnes knitted right alongside the rest of them, though she and George hadn’t gotten the chance to make a baby.
She was finding more and more comfort in prayer lately, she said.
Margaret had to get used to the attention pregnancy garnered.
People loved to smile at a pregnant woman, you felt so grand just stepping out of your car downtown.
And of course you smiled back, even though sometimes they went on to ask you things that were none of their business—things you were trying not to think about, like When are you due?
and Is this your first? and How many do you want?
Her face hurt from smiling after running errands—but not as much as her feet.
She hated the retching. And the queasiness that made her wish she could retch. And the sensations! Butterfly wings, they said. Brenda and Ruth at Step It Up. Several women at the hair salon. Fluttering around in your belly, they said. Do you feel butterfly wings?
Snakes, Margaret told them. It felt like there were snakes in her stomach.
When she asked the doctor at the VA hospital if it had ever been the case that a mother was allergic to her baby, he looked taken aback. It seemed like a reasonable question to her.
Sitting at home in the armchair in her living room, staring out the window at the crisp roof peaks across the street and the soft gray sky above, she wondered at the trap she was in.
She felt stupid for having marched so confidently into Columbus.
Stupid for letting Mr. Higgs just have her like that—as if she were a matter of course.
Stupid for marrying Felix with no indication that he was attracted to her, or that she was in love with him, and expecting both of those things to just happen overnight.
Stupid for not telling him up front, before they were married, that she didn’t want children, because all her stalling had accomplished was to land her on the other side of a war with a baby coming—a baby she had no choice but to act delighted about.
She could stew over these things for whole stretches of the day, growing bigger by the minute, before remembering that she wasn’t sure who the father was.
The last time she’d spoken with Cal had been at Step It Up, when, as they climbed back into their clothes, they agreed to have no more contact.
For everyone’s sake. She still felt that was the right thing, though she missed him a little.
She missed them, for exactly what they’d been.
Happy, sexy, fun—and ephemeral. That had been part of its appeal: they were like an ice-cream cone you’d be crazy to let melt.