When Chrissy was born I received a letter from my mother—I had not told her I was pregnant—and she wrote, You have a new baby girl, I had a vision of you holding a baby blanket and I knew it was a girl.
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These were things I always accepted about my mother.
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My own visions, often enough, did not come true and I dismissed them. （Although I had had my dreams about William’s affairs, if those were even visions and I think they were not, really—） But there is this one thing:
Years ago I had taught at a college in Manhattan, and I had a good friend who taught there too, and once I had gone to visit her in her country home on Long Island and I left my watch; it was a dime-store watch, worth almost nothing, and I did not think about it and did not ask her about it. But one morning—many, many months later—as I was getting on the subway I pictured the watch in my mailbox at the college—the mailboxes were just open slots on a wooden frame—and when I got there it was exactly the way I had pictured it, just sitting there in my mailbox. That was the weirdest vision I’ve had. I mean because it meant nothing to me. But there it was.
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We tried to have lunch in Houlton, but the one place we found closed at 2:30 and it was 2:35. “Sorry,” the woman said at the door, and then she closed the door and bolted it from the inside. “Is there any other place around here?” William tried to ask through the glass, and the woman just walked away.
“Jesus,” William said. “Okay, we’ll eat in Fort Fairfield.”
William’s plan was that we would drive to Fort Fairfield to see where Lois had been on a float through the streets in her glory as Miss Potato Blossom Queen—I did not know why this was important to William—and then we would spend the night in Presque Isle—a city forty miles away from Houlton but just eleven miles from Fort Fairfield—“because it interests me since Lois’s husband came from there” is what William said, about Presque Isle, and we would think about what we were going to do the next day when we drove back down through Houlton before getting our plane to New York that night. I mean we would decide what to do about the woman who lived at 14 Pleasant Street, William’s half-sister, Lois Bubar.
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On our way to Fort Fairfield there was suddenly much sky, and in a small way this thrilled me, because I had grown up with sky all around me. This sky was just gorgeous with sun but also very low clouds in places like a quilt, and the sun went in and out of these clouds, lighting up the pastures of green, and we passed a huge field of sunflowers. We also passed by fields with clover as a dark cover crop for nutrients that I knew from my youth would be plowed over in spring. It was interesting to me that I felt this small happiness at an almost familiar scene, that the panic of the isolation from this morning had changed into this. I felt a happiness, is what I am saying. And it made me think again about the memory of me driving as a young child next to my father in his truck.
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As we drove along the road—again almost no other cars were in sight—William said, “I’m sorry for all that crap I did in our marriage, Lucy.” He kept looking straight ahead at the road, he seemed relaxed as he drove, his hands were at the bottom of the steering wheel.
I said, “It’s okay, William, I’m sorry for how weird I got.”
And he nodded slightly and kept on driving.
We have had this conversation—almost exactly that—for a number of years since we separated, not frequently, but every so often it pops up: a mutual apology. This may sound strange, but it is not strange to William and to me. It is part of the fabric of who we are.
It seemed completely right that we should say this now.
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“Let me text the girls,” I said, and I did and they both got right back to me. Can’t wait to hear everything!, Becka wrote.
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We drove by two small houses that had satellite dishes. In the yard of a farmer, four long trucks stood, trucks that used to haul things; they had not been moved for years, grass was growing up all over them.
William said, “My father was in the Hitler Youth.”
“Tell me again,” I said, because he had already told me that, many years ago.
William said, “The only time that I can remember my father mentioning the war, there was something on television, what was it, that program about a German POW camp? It was supposed to be funny.”
I did not answer this because I had not had a television growing up, and also because I had heard this story before.