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159 Choices and Secrets between mark’s suicide and jamie’s pregnancy, Liz and I had a lot to digest in the summer of 1966. In early July, after two weeks of clamming, crabbing, and fishing on the Oregon coast, we fell back into our summer routines. I ran up Grider Creek Road in the mornings. We worked in the garden. On hot afternoons we piled into the station wagon and headed for a swimming hole.And as we floated side by side on our inner tubes above the green depths of Seiad Creek, or pulled weeds in the garden, we deconstructed the events of the past year. With Danny graduated, the Sullivans almost vanished from sight. Occasionally we saw his mother at the store,behind a pair of dark glasses. One day, Liz and I tookTommy for a hike up the steep trail that led up to Lower Devils Lookout, a thousand feet above the valley. He strode ahead of us with his toy rifle, his belt cinched tight, ready to protect his sisters against bears.As we paused on the five-mile-long trail to rest, we looked down on Mark’s house.“Do you think that Mark’s still around here somewhere?”Liz asked,her hands cupping her chin.She had never cried for Mark in my presence, not once, but now I heard her sniff. “I don’t think so,” I said.“He wasn’t happy here. I think when you die, you go back to where you were happy.” “Like to Grandmother’s house in Hilt,” Liz whispered. We had no news of Jamie over the summer, either. But in her story we heard echoes of our own family’s most notorious scandal, in which Aunt Jo had had a baby and given it up for adoption, before she met Uncle Carl. Late in the spring, rumors flew at school that one of Liz’s classmates had undergone an abortion; we felt only relief for her.Yet here was Jamie, pregnant and apparently unashamed, and supported by her family.Their only outward displeasure was aimed squarely at the young man who had promised marriage and then hit the road. Happy Camp was not Hilt; views on sex and divorce were more easygoing on the river. Many of our classmates didn’t share the last names of their parents or siblings, and no one seemed to care. Perhaps Light on the Devils 160 Jamie’s parents simply couldn’t afford the expense of either a clandestine abortion or a home for unwed mothers.As for Jamie herself, she was, she had said, coming back to high school as a senior that fall. It turned out that the tradition that barred mothers from high school was just that and had no actual force in the face of a determined student. One afternoon, as Liz and I pondered aloud the differences between 1956 and 1966, between our aunt’s history and Jamie’s, Aunt Jo telephoned Mother to tell her that she was divorcing Uncle Carl for the second time. A week later,on an afternoon in mid-July,Mother opened a letter from Jo and groaned. “She’s coming to visit, and she’s bringing a gentleman friend,”Mother paraphrased,scanning her sister’s looped consonants.“His name’s Jess, and she says he’s her fiancé.” Mother glanced at the calendar. “Oh, my God,” she said, and sat down at the table to scribble a shopping list. Jo and her beau would arrive on the same day as Grandmother and Grandfather. “I don’t know where I’m going to put everybody if they want to stay overnight,” she said, and Liz and I looked at each other.This, we said to ourselves,was going to be good. our grandparents drove up as I hoed the strawberries in the garden. Liz clattered through the garden gate and announced them, even as I heard the whale-bodied Oldsmobile’s engine dieseling in the driveway. “Grandmother’s crying,” she announced. By the time I had splashed water over my face and exchanged my grubby T-shirt for a blouse, Grandfather was peering beneath the hood, his sleeves rolled up to reveal his hairy, well-muscled forearms. Mother spoke to Grandmother through the rolled-down passenger-side window,and sure enough,I saw Grandmother wipe her eyes as Mother shepherded her out of the car and into the kitchen, planted her on the far side of the table, and...

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