As she walked up the gravel path, a small boy ran around the corner of the house with an Airedale chasing him. The boy laughed and shouted to his mother, the dog jumping and nipping him in mid air, and Helen stopped. His curly hair the exact brown shade of Darrow’s. Her legs went weak. Suddenly she did not want what she had come for. Nothing could be added; nothing would change her facts. The woman called out to the boy a name Helen couldn’t quite make out. Her blood pounded in her ears like waves, and she realized Darrow had never told her the boy’s name, had kept him unreal.
The child pointed his arm down the driveway toward Helen. The woman reached out for him, but he ducked away and began to run full speed down the driveway with her in chase. When they came within speaking distance, the woman stopped, and her face became hard, a cool stare. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Helen Adams. From Life. I have your… I have Sam’s things.”
“You’re late. You were supposed to be here hours ago.” The woman shielded herself as if a wind had come up. “I’m Lilly Darrow. Come,” she said, and walked back up to the house.
The interior was neat and dark, low ceilings and unlit Tiffany lamps, unused chintz-covered furniture. Gloomy, wood-carved antiques and marble-topped, sarcophagal tables, everything in perfect taste, fallow. It did not seem that a man had ever lived there, and certainly not Darrow. As they sat in the dim living room, Helen noticed Lilly’s face had a professional symmetry to it-a broad, pale forehead, tight smile. A face more to be admired than loved.
“Would you like tea?” she asked, and Helen, not listening, was at a loss until Lilly pointed to a china service. “I love having someone to entertain.”
“It’s too much…”
“Not after you flew across the country.”
Lilly lifted the tea tray and pushed at the swinging kitchen door. “Come on, if you want. It’s more comfortable in here.”
The light through the windows was murky, the sun hidden by tall pines that cast bluish, prone shadows on the back lawn. Copper pots hung from the kitchen walls. Stacks of dishes leaned in the glass-paned cabinets. She was right: Compared to the other room, this did feel more comfortable. Helen liked Lilly better for noticing the difference and admitting it. Her back was toward Helen while she filled the kettle. The fabric of her dress was expensive with a dull, heavy shimmer to the thread.
When the boy wandered in, Helen was unable to take her eyes from him. His brown hair was messed, a cowlick in front, the promise of his father’s heavy-lidded eyes and long, slender fingers.
“Go to your room, Sam. This friend of your father’s, who came all the way to see us. To bring you some of Daddy’s cameras.”
He looked at Helen with new interest. “Show them to me?”
Lilly interrupted before Helen could answer. “Not now. We’ll look later, okay? Now scoot.”
“That’s okay, I don’t mind.” She wanted the boy to stay, wanted the buffer of him.
“He never came here, you know,” Lilly said, taking out pastries from a box, and the evident effort that she had gone through belied her casualness. “We married in the city and lived in a small apartment before he left. My parents… live down the street. He told me family was important to him. So I made this home for him.”
“It’s lovely.”
“So he would have a home to come back to.” Lilly shook her head. “Someone to survive for.”
Helen said nothing. A feeling of claustrophobia, of wanting to escape, overcame her, and her hands fidgeted in her lap. As much as she hurt, she was lucky compared to this.
Lilly set down a series of forks and spoons at Helen’s place, put out individual pastries, berries and cream, small sandwiches, and sat down to pour. Up close, Lilly’s two front teeth, perfect otherwise, overlapped slightly. Helen hesitated, embarrassed that she did not know which fork to pick up.
“I was engaged to a law student from my hometown. But Sam… was so passionate about changing the world.” She picked up the fork farthest from the plate. “How could I not fall for him? I wanted to wait before we had children. Spend time alone.” She smiled and leaned forward, as if in confession. “I even thought of becoming a photographer. Going with him. But he insisted it was no place for a woman. He wanted a family.”
Helen used the small fork to tear apart her apple tart.
Lilly reached over and held Helen’s arm for emphasis. “I’m not naive. I understand things. He hated the war, and the two of you took solace in each other.”
Helen cleared her throat. “I brought everything I thought your son-”
“You’re the first one of them he talked of marrying, though.”
Them. So this was her purpose. Revenge posthumously. Helen put the tiny fork down and picked up the sandwich with her fingers. “He loved what he did.”
“Oh, yes.” Lilly stood and moved to the now dark window. She ran her hands over her hair and looked out into the dusk. A natural, unselfconscious gesture, it spoke of many afternoons spent alone. Helen could see only the pale forehead and curved line of her chin in the glow of the lamp. She imagined her as the young woman that Darrow had married. “He was ambitious, wasn’t he? That’s what I have to convince Sammy of. That he was a great man doing important work. That his death was a hero’s death.”
“Yes.” It took everything for Helen to remain seated in the room, not to run. A terrible mistake coming here; this woman twisting everything around until it was impossible to determine what was what.
“Every year he told me he was quitting. Each woman was the last. Finally I figured out that he was going to stay till he got killed.”
“We were about to leave.”
“I got divorce papers out of the blue. He wasn’t thinking straight.”
“He asked you in Saigon.”
“He never asked such a thing. We argued when he was coming home. What kind of father doesn’t see his son?”
“I came for the boy’s sake. You didn’t even know him. Everything that was most important about Sam, you didn’t know.”
“I’d say neither of us was his first love.” Lilly leaned back and spread her arms out, encompassing the room. “But at least I have this. His home. I’m his grieving widow. At least I have Sammy.”
“Yes.”
Lilly moved closer till Helen could smell her perfume, could see her eyes narrowed on her, and understood for the first time how angry she was, and how hard she was working at controlling that anger. “Women like you I can’t figure out. Was that little part of him really enough for you?”
Dizzy, Helen shook her head. “We had the war.”
“I loved him, you know. I loved him when he was himself. He lost himself over there, in that horrible little country, but that didn’t make me stop loving him.”
The kitchen had turned shadowy and cold. Helen shivered in her thin cotton shirt, she was always cold now, but Lilly had sweat across her pale, high forehead; she glowed with a mineral kind of heat. Finally Helen saw-this place had nothing to do with Darrow, except for the boy. It was their life, and the war inside it, that was real, and she had simply not understood.
“I hated you in Saigon,” Lilly said. She seemed weary from the long afternoon. “But I don’t anymore. You’ve lost more than I could ever take away.”
A month passed. Helen had returned to working in the bakery. Something had been solved in her mind regarding Darrow, and she lived with the past more easily. When Robert drove down from Los Angeles, and they walked arm in arm along the boardwalk in the cool, damp evening air, life almost seemed normal. The street along the beach was lined with slow-moving cars, teenagers cruising. Robert looked ten years younger than he had in Saigon.
“Peace has been kind to you,” Helen said.
“Can you believe we made it? Seems too good to be true,” he said. “Every morning I wake up, and I feel so grateful for the smallest things.”
She didn’t tell him about opening Linh’s letter. How the glow over the ocean was purple, the room dark, and as she opened the envelope, the pool of light from the reading lamp shone on the sheaf of gold rice
