Free Loss of Innocence by Richard North Patterson Page B

wheelchair. What I
do
believe is that there’s been enough—for this country and for his family.”
    To Whitney, this remark seemed subtly wrong, as though her father were blaming the victim for evoking passions of which he disapproved. But she had no heart to respond.
    On Sunday, Charles and Peter left for Manhattan, both with a kiss from Whitney. “Thanks for understanding,” she told her fiancé. “When you come back next weekend, I’ll be a normal girl.”
    But as he climbed in the taxi with her father, Whitney suddenly felt abandoned—even by Clarice, who had called to say she was off to visit friends on the East Coast. In the glow of a candlelit dinner, Whitney allowed her mother to lead her through the menu for her wedding, oddly grateful for a quotidian distraction that so obviously pleased Anne. “It’s so nice to see you becoming yourself,” Anne hopefully remarked, and Whitney assured her that she was fine.
    But she wasn’t, quite. And so the next morning Whitney drove to Dogfish Bar.
    The spot was down a mile of dirt road in an isolated section of Gay Head. A footpath through scrubby brush and sea grass led to a mile of sand and half-buried rocks, stretching toward the variegated clay promontory where the Gay Head lighthouse stood, a distant spike against the light blue sky. As often, and as she wished, Whitney was alone.
    On some mornings she would swim the bracing waters of the sound, made more tranquil by a sandbar. But today she brought her journal.
    This practice had started with the professor who, having discerned a talent Whitney doubted she possessed, had urged her to record her thoughts in order to discover them. Once written, he said, they were there—to be retrieved, rewritten, and polished for whatever use she chose.
    But he had also given her some tools. Under his tutelage, she discovered women who had become exemplary writers—Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, and before them, Edith Wharton—as well as John O’Hara, James Gould Cozzens, and Louis Auchincloss, all of whom she admired for their ability to convey human behavior so subtly yet so well. The discipline of regular writing, her professor insisted, would developher own gifts of illumination. Though painfully aware of her deficit in wisdom and experience, she had started keeping a diary.
    Sitting with it open in her lap, she gazed out at the sound and pondered the boundaries of her life. The world in which she had grown up was comfortable and happy, one that she had never questioned. The changing manners and mores she had encountered in college were, she understood, a small repudiation of that world, in which she had gingerly participated by dressing casually, sleeping with Peter, and, more substantively, tutoring in Roxbury. But even that did not put her at odds with Charles and Anne—while they worried for her safety, they could not quarrel with her desire to help a disadvantaged boy. Torn between the rebellious fervor of those classmates who protested Vietnam or segregation, and Charles’s greater knowledge and forbearance, she remained largely outside the ferment of her time in school.
    This morning, however, she felt strangely transformed. No doubt this was foolish, even narcissistic. But she could not avoid sensing that the death of Robert Kennedy had caused some deeper change in her, though she did not know what it was. All that she could do was put words to whatever might emerge.
    For a time she stared at the blank pages, pen in hand. At last, she began to write.
    On the surface, everything is the same. I admire my father. I love my family. Clarice is still my closest friend. I’m planning my wedding, and the start of the wonderful marriage I know I can create with Peter. I have everything I could need or want, and the life ahead of me I’ve always imagined.
    And yet.
    What is happening to me? I wonder. Part of it may be Janine. She’s in trouble, I’m sensing, and not just because