They Call Me Patrice

“Go inside, Patrice,” he said curtly. “Here, here’s the key. Hurry up.” He floored the accelerator, and the engine whined to life again.

She suddenly clung to his arm, “No, darling — what are you going to do?”

“I’m going back there. I have to. I have to find that check.”

She tried to hold him. “No, Bill! They’ll find you there! You’ll be involved—”

“Don’t you understand, Patrice? Your name has to stay out of this. That man’s dead. He’s been shot to death!”

He pulled her hands free. He opened the door and armed her out, with the side of his arm.

“Bill,” she pleaded. “Bill — for me — don’t go near that place again!”

“There may still be time, I may be lucky. No one may have found him yet. Patrice, was there anything else but that? Pull yourself together. Was there anything else?”

“No, only that.”

“Did you sign your name out at Hastings?”

“I had to. The Justice of the peace who married us out there is mailing the certificate to his address, in a day or two. Bill, they’ll hold you for it—”

“Let them,” he said. “I know I didn’t do it, and when you know that, you’re not afraid.”

Her helplessly-clutching hands slipped off the rim of the door as the car pulled away from her.

“Go back in the house, Patrice,” he said over his shoulder. “Keep watching from the window. Wait there in your room.”

She tottered a little, pulled forward by the momentum of the car, and then she was standing there alone, by the roadway, in the middle of the night.

All night by the window, until it grew light. Sitting there, staring, waiting, hoping, despairing, dying a little. Seeing the stars go out, and the dawn at last creep slowly toward her from the east, like an ugly gray pallor.

Motionless as a statue in the blue-tinged window, forehead pressed forward against the glass, making a little white ripple of adhesion across it where it touched. Eyes staring at nothing.

I’ve found my love at last, only to lose him. Why did I find out tonight I loved him, why did I have to know? Couldn’t I have been spared that at least?

The day wasn’t just bitter now. The day was ashes, lying all around her, cold and crumbled and consumed.

If there is such a thing as penance, absolution, for mistakes that can never be wholly righted she performed it and she gained it on that long vigil. The day was dead and her hopes were dead, and she couldn’t atone any further.

She could only watch and wait, somehow knowing that she would be waiting forever.

She turned her head and looked behind her. Her baby was awake, smiling at her. For once she had no answering smile to give him. She couldn’t smile, a smile would be too strange a thing upon her mouth after all she’d seen.

She turned her face forward again, so that she wouldn’t have to look at the baby too long. Because, what good did crying do? Babies cried to their mothers, but mothers shouldn’t cry to their babies.

The man came out on that lawn down there, pulling his gardenhose after him. He raised his arm and waved to her — why? How odd!

But he wasn’t looking the right way, somehow, to wave to her. He was turned too far around, as if looking somewhere past her.

Then quietly, unassumingly, the car glided to a stop in front of the door, directly below her. With Bill sitting in it.

He was so very real, so photographically real down there, that paradoxically, she couldn’t quite believe she was seeing him. The very herringbone weave of his coat stood out, as if a magnifying glass were being held to the pattern. The haggardness of his face, the faint trace of shadow where he needed a shave. She could see everything about him so clearly, as if he were much nearer than he was. Maybe it was fatigue. Or perhaps her eyes were dilated from long straining...  from a watch she had thought would never end that somehow, incredibly, was ended now.

He got out slowly, and came in toward the door. And just before he took the step that would have carried him out of sight below her, his eyes lifted and he saw her.

“Bill,” she said silently through the glass, and her two hands flattened to the pane, as if framing the unheard word.

“Patrice,” he said silently, from down below. And though she didn’t hear him, didn’t even see his lips move, she knew that was what he said.

He didn’t smile, nor stop. He went on to the door, his face set, tired.

Suddenly she’d fled from the room, madly rushing. The baby’s wondering head turned after her far too slowly to catch her in her flight.

She ran, then she stopped short below the turn of the stairs, and stood there, unable to move any further.

He was standing talking to Father Hazzard, just inside the open doorway. Father Hazzard must have been downstairs already, and had let him in.

He left his father and came over toward the stairs, and came on up them to where she was standing.

His father went back into the dining room and closed the door.

The two of them were alone there on the stairs.