The old man was sitting up against the pillows in a narrow hospital bed in Tonopah, in a blue gown, his thin white hair combed back and his pale hands resting on a folded blanket. He turned his head when I came through the door. His eyes were the same pale clear blue I had never forgotten, and in them was something I had not seen since I was eighteen years old and standing under a hot sky beside a Quonset hut. He was holding a narrow silver bracelet, tarnished almost black, the kind men wore in those days. I knew what was engraved on it before I read it.
Wade had come in behind me, his hat in his hands. He stood at the foot of the bed with his shoulders hunched, as though he did not know whether to leave. I crossed the room slowly. The old man watched me come. His lips moved, once, twice, trying to form a word that had been silent for six years. Then he said, in a voice that was cracked and hoarse and as gentle as a breeze, “Dorothy.” I put my hand over my mouth. “Dottie Lindgren,” he whispered. “You look just the same.”
I sat down in the chair beside the bed and took his hand. It was cold, and dry as paper, and it trembled in mine. “Hello, Tommy,” I said, and the name came out of my mouth as if it had been waiting under my tongue for fifty four years. He smiled, and the lines of his face rearranged themselves into the face of a boy. “I thought you were dead,” I said. “They told me you were missing. They said you were gone.” He nodded slowly. “I was,” he said. “For a while. Then I came back.”
Wade made a small strangled noise. I turned. His eyes were wet. He had spent his whole life with a father he scarcely knew, a silent man in work boots, who had never once spoken of his past. Now the old man was talking, and Wade stood frozen in the doorway, holding his breath, as though a sound might break the spell. The doctor, a young woman in a white coat, told us later that it was rare but not unheard of. A deep emotional memory, a familiar voice, a name. For an hour, he might be himself.
Memory is a patient thing. It can sleep for years inside a man, and wake with a single name, and say what has been waiting to be said.
Tommy told me, haltingly, in short phrases, with long pauses to rest. He had been shot down over Laos in September of 1972. He had survived the crash, and had been held in a camp for six months. In March of 1973 he was released in the great homecoming. When he returned to the base in Tonopah, he went straight to the officers club. He wanted to see me. But I was not there. A girl at the bar told him that Dottie Lindgren had left in October, after the news, and had married a boy from Spokane named Glenn.
I felt something go through me, a long cold sorrow, like the shadow of a cloud. I had not known. When the notice came, in the autumn of 1972, I had cried for weeks. My mother had said that I would grieve, and then move on. And I had. I had met Glenn at a church dance in Spokane the following spring, and he was kind, and steady, and he made me laugh. I had never been unhappy. But I had never forgotten the boy with the pale blue eyes. I had kept his photograph in a shoebox for fifty years.
“I did not blame you,” Tommy whispered. “I walked out of that club and I never looked back. I changed my name. Bjornstad was my stepfather. I went to Nevada. I became a rancher.” He looked at the bracelet. “I never married for love. I married a woman who was good to me. We had Wade. I was fond of her. But every year on the twelfth of August, I took out your picture. I drove the highway south of Tonopah, where we used to drive.” He swallowed. “That is why I was walking yesterday. I was looking for the club.”
Wade sank into the chair on the other side of the bed. He took the other hand of his father. “Dad,” he said, his voice breaking. “Dad, you never told us.” The old man turned his face to his son and smiled with such sweetness that I had to look away. “I am sorry,” he said. “I was ashamed. Not of her. Of me. Of what the war did.” He closed his eyes. A tear slid down the side of his nose. “I thought I had no right to talk about it. But I had a good life, son. A good one.”
We stayed beside him for most of the day. At some point in the afternoon, the light slanted through the blinds in long gold bars, and he fell asleep, still holding my hand. Wade went to fetch coffee. I sat there, watching the old man breathe, and I thought of Glenn. I thought of the thirty one years of our marriage, and the quiet evenings, and the way he had held my hand in the hospital at the end. I had not been cheated. I had been loved twice, by two good men. I think that is the secret of a happy life.
The old man woke a little before dark. He looked at me clearly. He said, “Dottie, was it a good life?” I told him it was. I told him I had two daughters and four grandchildren, a house with a view of the river, and a garden of roses. I told him I had no regrets. He nodded, and his shoulders relaxed against the pillow. “Good,” he said. “That is all I wanted to know.” And then, softly, as if he were telling me a secret, “I am glad it was you on the road.”
He lived another seven weeks. Wade moved him to the ranch, and I visited three times, driving down from Spokane in my old Buick. Each time he knew me, and each time he spoke a little, and the last time, in October, he asked me to read to him from the book of Psalms. He died in his chair by the window with the desert spread out before him. At the funeral, Wade handed me the silver bracelet. On the inside, in tiny worn letters, it said, Dottie L. 1972. I wear it every day.