Absolution

by Alice McDermott

“Damn thing has just died on us. We’re about ten miles from the airport. Lieutenant Welty’s gonna ride. He’s a long-distance biker. News to me. A man of many talents.”

truck. “Dominus vobiscum,”

I was still uncertain. “But he spoke English,” I said. “He’s an American.” She was smoking a cigarette, and I saw the fingers beneath it move together. “No, he didn’t,” she said. “Not in the truck. He spoke French. For Lily’s sake, I think.

pointillist,

Finally, Charlene said, “I refuse to say another word about him.” And screwed out her cigarette in the silver dish, scattering ash.

It could be a marvelous incentive. The mothers get a nice payoff at the end, and we get healthy babies to offer for adoption. At a premium.” “You’re talking about selling babies,” I said. Charlene turned back to me with a laugh that just couldn’t be suppressed. Her laugh.

swept her fingers over my palm, heel, lifeline, fingertips. “It’s the offer any mother would make. You’ll see when you have a baby of your own. My life for my child’s, my happiness for theirs. It’s immediate. Instinctual, I guess. A mother will bear any pain, any loss, if it means her child will thrive.”

“We’ll have lots of other chances,” she whispered.

“There’s going to be a reckoning, wait and see. This summer is just the start.” She sighed, her breath warm on my shoulder, her lips against the thin fabric of my nightgown. “We are on the precipice of tremendous change.” In truth, it took me a second to remember what she was talking about.

I had three more miscarriages and then a hysterectomy at thirty-five.

That’s how I remember Dominic Carey—a good, openhearted American kid. Lucky enough, I suppose, to get in and out of that place before so many kids like him were dying there in the awful years ahead. To get home to his wife and his baby and the rest of his life.

And now I’m picturing him once again on that road from the leprosarium, backlit by the headlights of our rescue vehicle. His grin under the wet peak of his cap. The elaborate sign of the cross he made.

An understanding, perhaps, of what a paltry, personal matter it is to lose your life. Now, tell me how you two met. Tell me everything. I have, these days, as you may have noticed, time on my hands. As much time to read as to write.

I found out about his time in Vietnam much later.

doesn't make sense

I told him that we, my husband Doug and I,

Dom’s oldest son was there, too, with his wife and their three small children, and Jamie, of course, at his father’s elbow, and Ellen, Dom’s wife.

It was the same proud, fond, sarcastic tone I’d heard other fathers use to deflect praise for talented sons.

Jamie grinned, raised the wine bottle triumphantly into the air. He put his free arm around his father’s pink neck, and all the little flames of the votive lights behind them suddenly leapt and flared—a trick of my own wine-fueled

tears.

Could Dom and Ellen ever stop seeing what might have been for their youngest, damaged son, in the beauty, the wholeness of their first? Could they ever stop thinking about what might have been if genetics, Mother Nature, hadn’t failed them?

“Well, they’re very affectionate,” Douglas added now—the buttered toast and the warm eggs working their charm on his mood. “Those Down syndrome kids. It’s possible

they wouldn’t change him if they could.” “I can’t believe that,” I said.

Problem was, now our children were grown and gone and reluctant, thus far anyway, to upend their own routines to come visit.

As you say, no such thing as a life without regret. Maybe because we fortunates have far too many options.

At my mother’s insistence—you can imagine Charlene planning a wedding—my own had been traditional enough, except for the few, unattributed lines from Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I’d asked the best man to read from the pulpit.

“You take after her,” he said. It was only the long habit of the years that made me tell him, “I hope not.”

WE RETURNED FROM SAIGON in the summer of 1964. My father, like your husband, didn’t want any more overseas assignments after the chaos of those final months in Saigon:

My brother identifies this as the morning Diem was overthrown.

That’s where I met Douglas.

It was all very detailed, Doug’s indictment of the guilty parties.

He gladly would have explained to you, for instance, why so many engineers were needed in Saigon. The depth charges that the navy was dropping into the South China Sea in the early sixties—World War II surplus,

Doug would have told you—were not meant to dredge Vietnamese ports as the dumb—bovine, Doug would have said—American public had been led to believe but to explore that small country’s offshore oil reserve. To have it all mapped out and ready...

I always told him he flattered himself. I married him mostly to piss off my mother.

SHE DIED OF KIDNEY CANCER. She was nearly sixty.

An annoying ache in her back that in what seemed merely a few nightmarish days was pronounced incurable. The placid everyday becoming, in our astonished retrospect, the last hours of her life.

I wish now I had gone to her immediately, gone home to her, but I didn’t. I told myself I had my family, my career, my daily demands. I told myself she would be fine.

She died well before any of us had shaken off our disbelief at the swiftness of it all—before we fully lost our childish faith in her ability to set anything, including her body itself, to rights. Or maybe it was only our faith in our own fortunate lives.

Doug had his Ph.D. by then—drug and alcohol counseling, what else?—and my brothers were settled in their careers. I was managing a title company out in the suburbs, wrangling real-estate attorneys and an...

Aunt Arlene, her resourceful sister—they were Charlene and Arlene; we were Rainey and Ransom; people di...

Like your father, he became susceptible in those years

to a startling weepiness.

We said of course we loved her. She was difficult sometimes, with her demands, her old-fashioned propriety. She was often a pain in the ass, exhausting—“Let’s face it”—but we loved her. “You wouldn’t know it, to hear you,” Arlene said.

“Someone who would have allowed her to do great

things,” Arlene told us. “Another oil guy,” Doug whispered.

inveterate

Since “clotheshorse” was a term she’d used often, my father and my brothers were satisfied with the wording. But you and I both know my mother had never used the phrase as a compliment. She had used it to indict, to reproach. To point out another woman’s shallow ambitions, her foolishness. Maybe it was a lingering bit of adolescent rebellion on my part. Or maybe the sudden loss of her had briefly revived my childish sense of abandonment. Maybe I thought I was settling some score. It was a small betrayal, anyway. Petty. But one I wish

now I had managed to resist.

wall. Then he turned back, and all that was familiar about his face, the still- identifiable traces of that skinny, funny stoner kid I had known and loved for most of my life, was transformed. By time, of course, but by fear, too. Something I knew in an instant I’d never seen in his face before. I was certain he didn’t know where he was.

DOUG’S DEMENTIA WAS DIAGNOSED in the months after Dom died.

Charlene appeared

so hAve we switched narrators