Even with the lights out Lucy could see the pale scar like an accent circumflex on Sloan's upper lip. It was not more than a quarter of an inch from point to point. Still, as he hovered over her, it was the scar she saw, and not his face, as first he watched her intently and then gradually withdrew into his own climax. No, through it all, she saw only the scar.
- She herself had a scar on her left hand where sheıd been badly cut by a broken drinking glass into which, palm down, she had been forcing an ice cube. She saw her own scar as a record of her personal history, a mark of foolish persistence. She had come to believe that Sloanıs scar was a hieroglyphic notation of his past.
- Sheıd waited until theyıd grown close enough for her to trace it with her finger before sheıd asked him about it. He told her that when he was sixteen a girl had thrown a rock at him. And now he had the scar. He hadn't wanted to say more to her, and Lucy noticed the muscle in his jaw clench as it did when he was unhappy.
- The time came, as it always does for two newly in love, to trade childhood stories. She told him how when she was four the older neighborhood kids had sent her out onto the fishpond to test the ice--and how theyıd brought her home, drenched and shivering, to her outraged parents. And she told him how when she was twelve, she and the boy next door had used the can of gasoline from lawnmower to dribble a trail of gas across the backyard and light it. Somehow theyıd gotten away with that and, she'd hinted, more.
- In return Sloan told Lucy that heıd made explosives with his chemistry set and detonated them in the back of his house in the winter. He liked to see the snow fly up. And he told her how heıd made a substitute teacher cry by setting off explosives like cherry bombs, disrupting classes she'd barely had under control anyway. And later he told her how heıd set off little explosions in his living room fireplace when his parents were gone.
- Because of her own experience with the gasoline, Lucy found none of his stories daunting. After all Sloan hadn't tortured small animals or practiced self-mutilation.
- Besides, Lucy knew herself to be what was once called a strong-minded woman. She had opinions, and after a while those opinions developed for her the force of documented fact.
In her eyes Sloan's greatest virtue was that he seemed to be blind or at least indifferent to her allegiance to her convictions. Lucy never thought that Sloan might have conjectured that her convictions about his worth would serve his purposes though she knew he valued what he called "loyalty."
- Sloanıs indifference to Lucy's list of unassailable convictions, this virtue, was insufficient in itself for a relationship, but there was enough superficial compatibility for them to spend increasing time together, to become, in the manner of so many other young people like them, a couple.
- Eventually Lucy learned that not only did Sloan value loyalty, he had, as a young man punished slights. He told her that in high school he had stolen the notebooks of classmates who had snubbed him so that they would do poorly on their exams. Once after a girl had refused to dance with him at an eighth grade party, heıd stolen her cat and taken it to the animal shelter as a stray. Of course Lucy had not heard these things at once, or even in the first year of their going together.
- Lucy watched almost with detachment as first Sloan left a toothbrush, then underwear and shirts in her apartment. But she almost held her breath as more and more of his belongings took possession of her apartment. Her bureau became their bureau, and her closet, their closet. He began to call in the afternoon to say when he would be home.
- It was not until he'd given up his apartment and they were "indissoluble" as he said that she chanced to ask again about his scar. This time he told her more, how he'd been riding his bike and Sandy DeMarco, who lived a few streets away from his home, had taken aim like he was a moving a target in an arcade, had hurled a rock and hit him in the face. She'd knocked him off his bike, and he lay in the street and had nearly been run over while she ran back and hid in her house.
- "Why did she do that?" Lucy asked with the proprietary tone of a woman whose man has been wronged.
He shrugged. "She just felt like it, I guess."
- "Didn't you ever find out?"
- "Why bother."
- "What did you do to get even?" The question came naturally. Knowing him as he was, she was sure that he wouldn't have let this pass without retribution.
- Sloanıs face was blank, so neutral that only concentration could have emptied it so completely of any trace of emotion. "I didn't have to do anything," he said. And then his expression changed to what it always was when he spoke of how he'd "done things," bright and matter of fact. "I didnıt have to," he repeated.
- "You didn't have to?" What a funny way of putting it, she thought. "Why not?"
- "The next week her little brother died, was killed, a freak accident. Apparently he'd found some explosives, probably from a construction site people thought, and he'd bit them or something."
- "How could that be?" Lucy watched him look past her.
- "I don't know. I was a kid. It was in the papers. We talked about it at school. That's all."
- She felt his eyes search her face for another question, a sign of insistence, of disloyalty. She had her suspicions, her ideas, what would eventually become for her a conviction. Because it must remain unspoken there could be no denial, no appeal, only a long sentence of silence for both of them, and, of course, the scar.
