(Sarah)
As his hands touched the shawl I had woven ten years ago, I felt drawn to the stranger, although he didn’t really seem like a stranger. His face was familiar. His name, Jeremy Broad, rang a bell, but I couldn’t place him. I realized I hadn’t felt this drawn towards a man in many years, since before Roger hanged himself. Weaving had been my salvation. I used Roger’s money to buy a yarn store, something I’d always dreamed of doing. It kept me busy, running the store, setting up classes, and then the creation of goods from the skeins and balls of yarn. I wove a protective wrapping around my heart, but the whole thing failed, and the only thing I was left with was that protective wrapping around my heart. How had he found a loose end, and why was he starting to unravel it? I repeated his name, Jeremy Broad, as if it had a magic I could use to make full my empty life.
“Why did your husband kill himself?” he asked from the kitchen table. I felt slapped. I looked up at him from the counter where I was laying out the things for tea. People asked that question shortly after Roger hanged himself, but soon the question disappeared. When new acquaintances learned Roger committed suicide they never asked the impolite “why?”
“Why did Don Bowerman kill himself?” I decided to return the slap, but he didn’t flinch. His chin was still resting in his hand, the elbow on the table and those blue eyes still staring at me, absorbing, unraveling. There was no hesitation in his answer:
“Don was too intense, too honest, too creative, too brilliant for the world. Such people suffer: suffer in ways we never know. They have this brilliance and the world ignores it. I don’t think Don could tolerate his brilliance anymore, or tolerate its being ignored.”
I tried again to place his face, but couldn’t. He had spoken with such little emotion, like a lecturer bored with having to deliver the same lecture. His lack of emotion about his friend’s suicide created a vacuum into which I suddenly found myself pouring my emotions about Roger.
“My husband was a self-pitying bum. He blamed Vietnam for everything that went sour in his life, including me. Vietnam syndrome or some such crap they call it.” The depth of my own anger after all these years surprised me. I had never expressed it.
I walked to the table with the teapot and cups.
“You know what he used to do? He had his Vietnam stuff in a couple of footlockers down in the basement. He’d stay down there until late at night fiddling with the stuff. Drinking beer. Then he started buying all those guns. I hate guns. How did your friend kill himself?”
(Jeremy)
I looked at the wrinkles around her eyes, the furrows in the brow, the cheeks just going pudgy. It was a face preparing for middle age.
“A pistol,” I told her, and put my index finger in my mouth and cracked my thumb. I knew it was a crude gesture. She didn’t flinch. Instead, she spoke.
“My best friend was raped and killed when that madman was on the loose ten years ago. She was a beautiful girl. I couldn’t understand it when she died. She was so much more full of life than I was. But when my husband hanged himself I didn’t feel so badly. He was empty of life. Life had left him, gotten tired of him, and departed from him. So, really, all Roger hanged was the shell that had been his life.”
“Did they ever find that rapist? I remember the panic in the town. The townies were sure it was a college student and the gownies were sure it was a townie. How many girls did he kill? Four?”
“No, five. And no they never found him. Once in a while the paper does a story reminding us all about it.”
“Which one was your friend?”
“Lily Straus. The last one. He must have abducted her when she got off work at the restaurant. They found her body two days later in a field. Just like the others. Roger was her boyfriend. It was the week before he returned from Vietnam. We comforted each other. We got married and he hanged himself.”
I finished my tea and watched her staring off into space. I knew the space into which she gazed. That middle ground of emptiness where people search for answers when they don’t even know how to frame the questions.
She seemed to snap to.
“The notebook. Shall we see if the notebook is still there?” she asked.
