A few weeks later Vicky and I were standing together at New Orleans International. The weather had gone suddenly, unseasonably warm. We watched a small private plane gather speed and tear itself away from the earth. Earlier Don, Sansom and some others had been over for drinks and good-byes. Now it was our turn.
“I don’t know what might make you happy, Lew,” she said, “But whatever it is, I hope you’ll find it.”
“Or give up trying?”
“Quite.” She put her hand over mine on the railing. We could feel the heat through the window. I would never forget her eyes, the way her mouth shaped itself around words as they left it. “You didn’t know, but when I met you I had decided already to leave, to go home. I was never certain why I didn’t, not until you came to Hotel Dieu and found me. Only then did I realize that was what I had waited for.”
“I was in pretty terrible shape when you met me, Vicky.”
“Aren’t we all…. You know where I’ll be, Lew. You can come anytime, if you change your mind.”
“And you’ll be waiting?”
“Waiting, no. But I will be there for you if you come. This has all been something very special for me, Lew.” She held her hand up by her heart, closed, then slowly opened it.
Eventually her flight was called, we fumbled through final farewells and awkward embraces, and she followed the laws of perspective down an embarkation tunnel.
I went to the bar for a drink and ran into a guy I’d gone to high school with and hadn’t seen since. Vicky had sold the car just before leaving. He was a cabbie now and offered me a free run home. But when we walked out a couple of hours and several drinks later, there was Verne leaning against the streetlight at the corner.
“Need a ride home, soldier? I’ve got my car.”
“I hope you don’t mind, Lew,” she said, feinting her way onto the expressway. “I know what just went down. Thought you could use a friend about now.”
“And always. But what about your doctor?”
She shrugged. “History.”
I watched her face pass through lights like a boat over waves.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ve kept up, Lew. I talked to Don Walsh and some others, I always knew how you were, what you were up to.”
“You should have called. Or just come by.”
She shook her head. Several blocks passed beneath us as we curved across the city’s sky.
“Are you working?”
“Yeah,” she said, and laughed. “At a rape crisis center-can you feature that? For a long time now.”
“You get paid?”
“Sometimes.”
A little later she looked over at me and said, “Where’ll it be, Lew?”
“I don’t want to go back to my place.”
“I thought you might not. There’s always mine.”
“Catching balls on the rebound?”
She shrugged. “Whatever works. You wait and see.”
“Right,” I said. “You wait and see.”