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Maeve did not go back to St. Mary's after her staff cleared, nor to any other university, nor to Temple University Medical School where she had been accepted.
She thought of David often in the days and weeks after. The lamp light outside the home would not turn off after that. The cold had damaged the wiring or something, frozen it in the on position. It was a reminder in the first few days but it eventually burned out. She wept a few times but it had been only three days, three Days of David, three revolutions around the sun. It faded. The guilt and shame too. She rationalized. It never would have worked. Me, a Johnny Appleseed missionary? She didn't tell anyone. Only two people knew, she and David, and now they were 1,000 miles apart.
She had not told her parents David's name. She had told them that a school friend was driving her. Another young woman from St. Mary's, she implied. That was why she had not even introduced David to her parents when they arrived under the lamp light at home in Barnesboro.
In the summer of 1963 Maeve met Dr. Emmitt Kovalchak, nine years her senior, and they began seeing each other. She never thought of David then. Maeve lived at home until she was married two years later. She bore Dr. Kovalchak three children.
She never heard again from David. At first it bothered her a little bit--woman's pride. Pride became resentment on a few occasions, the few that she thought of him. For a few years as she and her husband were having their family she did not think of David.
Two decades later after the computer revolution Maeve, curious, googled David to see if she could learn anything about what had become of him. She could not find him. Had time turned the real into a dream? Or had her mind turned a dream into something real? She googled David a few times over the years but could never learn anything.
And she never did.
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