Hearts In Atlantis

Street Hill on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms.”

I took the snapshot from her, held it in the light, and bent over it, looking at the boy with the crewcut. Looking at his thin stick arms, then looking at the girl. She was an inch or two taller than he was, and broader in the shoulders. I looked at the other boy, Sully. He of the tumbled black hair and the All-American grin. Stoke Jones’s hair; Skip Kirk’s grin. I could see Sully carrying her in his arms, yeah, but the other kid—

“I know,” she said. “He doesn’t look big enough, does he? But he carried me. I started to faint and he carried me.” She took the picture back.

“And while he was doing that, this kid Willie who helped beat you up came back and stole his glove?”

She nodded. “Bobby took me to his apartment. There was this old guy who lived in a room upstairs, Ted, who seemed to know a little bit about everything. He popped my arm back into its socket. I remember he gave me his belt to bite on when he did it. Or maybe it was Bobby’s belt. He said I could catch the pain, and I did. After that . . . after that, something bad happened.”

“Worse than getting lumped up with a baseball bat?”

“In a way. I don’t want to talk about it.” She wiped her tears away with one hand, first one side and then the other, still looking at the snapshot. “Later on, before he and his mother left Harwich, Bobby beat up the boy who actually used the bat. Harry Doolin.”

Carol put her photograph back in its little compartment.

“What I remember best about that day—the only thing about it worth remembering —is that Bobby Garfield stood up for me. Sully was bigger, and Sully might have stood up for me if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Bobby was there, and he carried me all the way up the hill. He did what was right. It’s the best thing, the most important thing, anyone has ever done for me in my life. Do you see that, Pete?”

“Yeah. I do.”

I saw something else, too: she was saying almost exactly what Nate had said not an hour before . . . only she had marched. Had taken one of the signs and marched with it. Of course Nate Hop- penstand had never been beaten up by three boys who started out jok-ing and then decided they were serious. And maybe that was the difference.

“He carried me up that hill,” she said. “I always wanted to tell him how much I loved him for that, and how much I loved him for show-ing Harry Doolin that there’s a price to pay for hurting people, espe-cially people who are smaller than you and don’t mean you any harm.”

“So you marched.”

“I marched. I wanted to tell someone why. I wanted to tell some-one who’d understand. My father won’t and my mother can’t. Her friend Rionda called me and said . . .” She didn’t finish, only sat there on the milk-box, fidgeting with her little bag.

“Said what?”

“Nothing.” She sounded exhausted, forlorn. I wanted to kiss her, at least put my arm around her, but I was afraid doing either would spoil what had just happened. Because something had happened. There was magic in her story. Not in the middle, but somewhere out around the edges. I felt it.

“I marched, and I guess I’ll join the Committee of Resistance. My roommate says I’m crazy, I’ll never get a job if a commie student group’s part of my college records, but I think I’m going to do it.”

“And your father? What about him?”

“Fuck him.”

There was a semi-shocked moment when we considered what she had just said, and then Carol giggled. “Now that’s Freudian.” She stood up. “I have to go back and study. Thanks for coming out, Pete. I haven’t ever shown that picture to anyone. I haven’t looked at it myself in who knows how long. I feel better. Lots.”

“Good.” I got up myself. “Before you go in, will you help me do something?”

“Sure, what?”

“I’ll show you. It won’t take long.”

I walked her down the side of Holyoke and then we started up the hill behind it. About two hundred yards away was the Steam Plant parking lot, where undergrads ineligible for parking stickers (fresh-men, sophomores, and most juniors) had to keep their cars. It was the prime makeout spot on campus once it got cold, but making out in my car wasn’t on my mind that night.

“Did you ever tell Bobby about who got his baseball glove?” I asked. “You said you wrote to him.”

“I didn’t see the point.”

We walked in silence for a little while. Then I said: “I’m going to call it off with Annmarie over Thanksgiving. I started to phone her, then didn’t. If I’m going to do it, I guess I better find the guts to do it face to face.” I hadn’t been aware of coming to any such decision, not consciously, but it seemed I had. Certainly it wasn’t something I was saying just to please Carol.

She nodded, scuffing through the leaves in her sneakers, holding her little bag in one hand, not looking at me. “I had to use the phone. Called S-J and told him I was seeing a guy.”

I stopped. “When?”

“Last week.” Now she looked up at me. Dimples; slightly curved lower lip; the smile.

“Last week? And you didn’t tell me?”

“It was my business,” she said. “Mine and Sully’s. I mean, it isn’t like he’s going to come after you with a . . .” She paused long enough for both of us to think with a baseball bat and then went on, “That he’s going to come after you, or anything. Come on, Pete. If we’re going to do something, let’s do it. I’m not going riding with you, though. I really have to study.”