colored eyes behind dark glasses watching her as if she were the enemy.
“I meant — only — if you needed anything, Jeremiah. I could bring it.”
“Bring yourself, Sophie. That’s all I want.”
Sophie’s eyes flooded with tears. To this remark she could think of no adequate reply.
Of course she would tell no one — not her closest friends, nor those relatives who called her frequently because they were worried about her — of her plans to fly a thousand miles to visit a man she had not seen in a quarter-century. A man whom she’d never known. A political-radical outlaw believed to be dead, who had died twenty years before in the clandestine preparation of a bomb intended to kill innocent people.
In the cemetery amid the damp grasses she stood before the small rectangular grave marker, she had not visited in months.
MATTHEW GIDEON QUINN
On this misty-cool and sunless April morning she was the only visitor in the cemetery.
The air was so stark! So sharp! Her eyes stung with tears like tiny icicles. She felt a flutter of panic, at all that she’d lost that was reduced to ashes, buried in the frozen ground at her feet.
Waiting for a revelation. Waiting for a voice. Of release, or condemnation.
Was this Matt’s voice? Had she heard correctly? Had he ever made such an extravagant promise to her, he could never have kept?
Sophie was feeling light-headed, feverish. She hadn’t slept well the previous night. Her brain was livid with plans, what she would pack to take with her, what she would say to Jeremiah Kolk when they were alone together. Early the next morning she was flying out from Newark, west to Sourland, Minnesota.
“Matt? I will be back, I promise. I won’t be gone long.”
Plaintively adding, “I need to do this. Kolk needs me.”
How silent the cemetery was! Sophie felt the rebuke of the dead, their resentment of the living.
And then, in the small grim airport at Grand Rapids, she didn’t see Kolk.
In a shifting crowd of people, most of them men, not one seemed to bear much resemblance to Jeremiah Kolk.
The flight from Minneapolis to Grand Rapids had been turbulent and noisy. For the past forty minutes which were the most protracted forty minutes of Sophie’s life the small commuter plane had shuddered and lurched as if propelled through churning water and as the plane descended at last to land Sophie felt her heart beating hard, in primitive terror. Of course, this was a mistake. Anyone could have told her, this was a mistake. Grief had made her a desperate woman.
Yet chiding herself with a sort of dazed elation
The commuter plane disembarked not at a gate but on the tarmac in a lightly falling snow. One by one passengers made their perilous way down steep metal steps, that had been wheeled to the plane. There was an elderly woman with a cane, who had to be assisted. There was a heavyset Indian-looking man with a splotched face, whose wheezing breath was frightening to Sophie, who had to be assisted. Sophie had the idea — it was a comforting idea — or should have been a comforting idea — that her friend must be just inside the terminal watching — watching for her — and so she made her way down the metal steps calmly if in a haze of anticipation, a small mysterious smile on her lips.
And then inside the terminal — her deranged girl’s heart was beating very hard now — she didn’t see him. At the lone baggage carousel she didn’t see him. No one? No Kolk? After their letter-exchanges, their telephone conversations? Sophie stared, at a loss. Several men who might have been Kolk — of Kolk’s age, or approximately — passed her by without a glance. A rat-faced youngish man with ragged whiskers and hair tied back in a ponytail passed so closely by Sophie that she could smell his body, without glancing at her.
Sophie thought
Kolk had provided her with a single telephone number, in case of emergency — not his home or cell phone number but that of the auto repair in Sourland Junction. Useless to her, now!
And then, she saw a man approaching her. He was walking with a curious limp. Sophie stared, and began to feel faint.
This man was middle-aged, bulky-bodied. For one who limped with a shuffling-sliding motion of his left foot he moved quite readily. He would have been a tall man of over six feet but his back appeared to be bent like a coat hanger wantonly twisted. His face glared like something hard-polished with a rag. His head looked as if it had been shaved with an ax blade. There were the schoolboy wire-rimmed glasses but the lenses were dark-tinted, hiding the eyes. From the lower part of his face metallic-gray whiskers sprang bristling yet as he drew closer Sophie could see that the left side of his face was badly scarred, disfigured — a part of the lower jaw was missing, a double row of teeth exposed as in a ghastly fixed smile. The right side of his face was relatively untouched, unlined. As he made his shuffling-sliding way forward people glanced at him — turned to stare after him — but he ignored them. Perhaps in fact he didn’t see them. Having sighted Sophie standing very still staring at him as he approached he smiled exposing stubby teeth that glistened, of the color of old piano keys.
“Sophie. You came.”
It was a blunt statement of triumph, elation. It was a statement of masculine appropriation.
Sophie stammered hello. There was a deafening roar in her ears. She thought — they were in a public place, he could not harm her if she ran away. If she ran into the women’s room, and did not reappear. He would have to let her go.
Seeing the look in Sophie’s face, Kolk smiled harder. “Am I the person you expected to see, Sophie? No? Or maybe — yes? If you are ‘Sophie.’”
Sophie had no idea what this meant. She was staring at Kolk’s eyes — the dark-tinted lenses of his glasses, that hid his eyes — to avoid looking at his mutilated jaw. Weakly she said:
“Are you — ‘Jeremiah’? Is that what people call you — ‘Jeremiah’?”
“No. ‘Kolk.’”
It was a blunt ugly name. It had not seemed to suit Jeremiah Kolk as a young man in Madison, Wisconsin, but it had come to suit him now in this middle-aged ravaged state.
As Sophie hesitated, not knowing what to say, Kolk took her hand in greeting, squeezed her fingers hard as if claiming her. Now, could she run away? Could she hide from him? She was smiling confusedly, trying not to wince in pain. Though his spine seemed to be twisted, yet Kolk was taller than Sophie by several inches and loomed over her. He wore fingerless gloves, his exposed fingers were nicked with small cuts, scars and burns, Sophie was remembering how years ago she’d dared to touch Kolk’s arm and he’d thrown off her hand. Rudely he’d turned from her as if her touch had repelled him but now Sophie wondered if this strange awkward disfigured man expected her to embrace him in the way of people greeting one another in airports — to throw her arms around him, and brush her lips against the side of his face.
But which side of Kolk’s face — the shiny-scarred melted-away side, or the more normal side — would Sophie kiss? She guessed that Kolk would be keenly aware of such a choice.
Kolk asked if Sophie had anything more than the single suitcase at which she was clutching and Sophie said no she had not. Kolk frowned.
“Let’s go, then. It’s good to get back before dark.”
Something had disappointed him. The single suitcase, maybe.
This lightweight suitcase, Kolk insisted on taking from Sophie. It was on rollers, but Kolk carried it.
The roaring in Sophie’s ears had only slightly abated. Was she going with this man, then? This disfigured
