"She knew when she fell in love with him
that she would be in love forever,
just as she knew when she woke up
in the backseat the next morning, cramped and headachy,
and looked at Dion sleeping with his mouth
open that she was no longer in love with him
and never would be.
[LAUGHTER]
She opened the door and stepped out into the damp morning air.
She began to think of Ron's long fingers resting
on the steering wheel of his father's
Mercury and his father's air conditioning business.
Dion stretched, scrunching his eyes, his limbs snaking
around the corners of the seats up to the back dash.
His T-shirt pulled up to show his stomach.
He opened his eyes and watched her standing
in the open doorway, and he smiled.
'We should go,' she said. 'I'm afraid someone will find us
here.'
He shrugged.
Obviously, he cared nothing for what people thought.
How had she miss this before?
He moved like an oaf, like her father,
slowly opening the door as if there was no hurry, digging
the keys out of his pocket.
'I'm not feeling well,' she said,
making a show suddenly of holding her stomach.
He leaned forward over the wheel and shot her a glance.
'What's wrong?' 'I don't know,' she said irritably as if it was
all his fault. He recoiled a little against his door
and leaned his elbow out the window,
steering with one thumb.
As they neared her house, he started to get nervous,
leaning forward over the wheel.
'When am I going to see you again?'
She looked at the dashboard as if she hadn't heard.
He pulled over to the side of the road
and turned to her, the words she had been saying-- his own name
and I love you, I love you-- playing through his head.
He wasn't going to say them.
They were her words, and he didn't
want to tell her to say them.
But he needed her to say them.
She put her hand on the door.
He watched it resting there.
'I can walk from here,' she said and stepped out of the car.
'Where are you going?' he screamed so loudly she stumbled
off the road.
She could see her house from here, across the road
and down the field.
'I don't love you anymore,' she said.
He was out of the car now with his hands on the roof, just
looking at her.
It seemed that he must have known
all along what would happen.
He could have made a noise like the sudden roar of gravel
pouring from a dump truck at the construction site
where his father worked.
This much force and more had built up in his chest.
He could have crushed her words with his own.
He could have screamed so loudly she would have ceased to exist,
but he was silent.
She sensed him stumbling through the field after her.
Her mother came to the window, saw her,
and called her father, who arrived at the window
with a shotgun.
Seeing her father, Natalie ran away
from the house toward the woods.
Her mother came out onto the front steps and screamed,
'Natalie!'
Natalie tripped and vanished into the blond straw.
By the time she stood, her father was on the phone,
calling his friends.
Dion tripped on a log and twisted his ankle.
She was out of sight.
These were her woods.
She had grown up playing here.
He stood with his arms apart, hunkered down,
and screamed her name as loudly as he could.
She stopped running and looked up at the sky
washing over the treetops.
They could probably hear her name all the way in Bath,
she thought.
He loved her.
He really did.
She ran on but stopped when her name sounded again and again,
moaning through the trees like a foghorn,
his voice seeming more desperate and distant.
He was headed in the wrong direction,
and she almost called out to him.
And Mr. Dawson opened his door and stepped out
before putting his truck in park.
It lurched forward slightly before he could hit the brake.
No one was watching.
His neighbor, Mr. Shumaker, ran across the lawn,
taking long, even strides.
Their boots crunched over the dried leaves and grass
with the sound of falling water, all of them
headed toward Natalie's father standing
at the edge of the woods.
'This way,' he called and ran into the shadows.
They all stopped running when Dion's voice called
for Natalie, his voice, her name.
They leaned over their knees, listening
to their own heavy breathing.
The smell of their own musty heat
escaped from beneath their shirt collars.
Dion stopped calling her name.
She turned at the edge of Nason's field
when she heard the silence.
When she listened harder, she heard the voices
of her father, her uncles, their friends,
and the fathers of her friends calling to one another.
For a moment, she wanted to take it all back.
She did love him.
Then she wanted to take it all the way back to never having
loved him to begin with.
She couldn't say now how it had all started.
Ron would never forgive her.
No one would.
They caught up with him, all the men shouting at once,
stumbling and waving.
Dion couldn't hear what any one of them said,
only fragments of words and phrases.
Finally, Natalie's father appeared,
and Dion could see the resemblance
in the shape of his face, thin but sagging near the jowls.
Her father was the only one not shouting
as the rest formed a circle around him,
the ends of their waving gun barrels like dark eyes.
Dion raised his hands as the police had told him
to one night in Monmouth.
He closed his eyes and pictured the house he and Natalie were
going to have, every room smelling of her wrist,
the bed with the tent, and the red barn
with the horse, the boat with the captain taking them
down the coast toward the sun.
He could see it all so clearly it
seemed as if these things had already happened,
and he was looking back now after a lifetime together.
'David Dion.' It was her father's voice rising above
the others.
The father had a right to speak.
He was the one wronged.
Anything he did might be excused later.
Dion looked briefly at her father and the others.
Her father's eyes darted around the woods,
skipping off Dion's face every few seconds.
Dion lowered his chin and closed his eyes again,
holding his arms out so they would know he was unarmed.
It seemed he had been waiting his entire short life
to accept blame.
'David Dion.' His name again, and the picture Dion had formed
on the backs of his closed lids of her father pointing a finger
at him, eyes red with anger, almost with tears,
was more accurate than the real thing.
Dion waited for his name, imagining her father's mouth
opening, his jagged teeth bared.
Instead, there was the deafening crack of a shotgun blast,
and in the total silence that followed,
Dion found himself floating in the treetops,
uncertain if he was dreaming or dying.
The maple and oak leaves turned toward him and shivered.
He saw the field beyond the woods where a burst of wind
sliced a path through the grass like an invisible hand combing
through hair.
At the edge of the field near the road,
Natalie stood looking back.
She made him so sad he had to look away, into the sun.
When he looked back down, it was too late.
The image of the sun was burned into everything he saw.
I was outside our house throwing a tennis ball against the wall,
pretending I was the star of a baseball game with scouts
ready to sign me up, and was just
winding up for another pitch when
I heard the crack of the gunshot echo across town.
My mother flew right out of the back door
and grabbed hold of me, searching my arms and chest
to see if I'd been hit.
Mrs. Dawson dropped a sandwich roll at Dawson's Variety
and ran outside with the customers
and looked up at the sky.
Natalie's mother fell to the floor in her kitchen.
In her mind, they were all dead: her husband, her daughter,
and Dion.
The police chief stood up from his desk
and looked at the receptionist.
He had been afraid of what might happen if people took
the law into their own hands.
Well, this was the consummation of our relief.
When Dion opened his eyes, though, he was still there,
kneeling before his accusers, handfuls of dirt and pebbles
sprinkled over his shoulders.
All the men's eyes searched his body for wounds or blood,
but there were none.
Natalie's uncle had fired a shotgun by accident,
blowing a hole in the ground and kicking up
a cloud, nothing more.
Now, gazing back across the field to the woods
where he lay dying, Natalie found
it impossible to accept at first that they had shot him.
But then it made sense, and she decided
she would bear the mark of his death
by never smiling again for the rest of her life.
[LAUGHTER]
For her, the siren approaching from across town
was the sound of an ambulance arriving
too late, the second siren which came a moment later,
the sound of the police coming for her.
She raised her chin and removed the strands of hair
from her face to see if Dion's soul was rising out of his body
over the treetops and into the sky.
In court, as in her prayers to him,
she would beg for mercy and for pardon.
She would admit everything, absolving everyone but herself.
For a few moments this morning, she
had been a fool thinking love was not real,
thinking she could live without him,
and now she had lost everything."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]