Nuclear Option. Dorothy Van Soest

      “I know,” I say.

      Just then a waitress appears. She plunks two mugs on the table and fills them with coffee without asking if we want any. Some things never change.

      “Okay, folks.” She pulls out a pencil and order pad from her apron pocket, then taps her foot on the worn linoleum and rolls her eyes. When I order a chocolate malt and Corey orders two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, she gives us a Well, it’s about time sigh and stalks off.

      “Your father loved it that Nick’s serves breakfast twenty-four hours a day.” Corey furrows his brow. I don’t tell him he’s just ordered Norton’s favorite dinner.

      My iPhone beeps, a text from J. B. Sorry I missed the memorial. Got caught up with the protesters outside. Where are you? I text back, tell him I’m at the diner and invite him to join us. “That was my friend J. B.,” I tell Corey. “He’s an investigative reporter with the New York Times. He was supposed to meet me at the church but didn’t make it.”

      Corey doesn’t seem interested. “I s’pose you’re going to the protest at Nectaral.” His set jaw is a dare.

      “I haven’t decided.” I don’t tell him about the tug-of-war in my heart during the memorial service, the struggle between two parts of me—the one that works to remain composed and serene, and the one that surges with passion to act, to be more impulsive, more unstinting. More like I used to be, more like I imagine Bertha Pickering was.

      “How about you,” I ask. “Are you planning to go?”

      He jerks his head from side to side. “Protests don’t change anything. No one pays attention.”

      “I do plan to get signatures on the petition in support of the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons. One hundred and twenty-two other countries have already adopted it.”

      He shakes his head. “Nothing but pie in the sky. Another hollow effort. We have to do something to make things change fast.”

      “That’s not how change happens, I’m afraid. I wish it did.”

      His face freezes, hard, like a stone. “Then we’re doomed.”

      “Not necessarily.” I could cite examples of how things have changed over time after long periods of struggle, but I don’t want to get into an argument. “I don’t know,” I say instead. “Maybe we’re doomed no matter what we do. Sometimes it’s hard to have hope.”

      The muscles in his jaw tighten even more. He hisses, “We have to make ’em listen.” He looks from left to right as if checking to make sure no one else can hear, then lowers his voice to a whisper. “And believe me, Sylvia, that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

      The steely determination and deep passion in his voice sound like Norton, only there’s an edge of violence to it, like a volcano threatening to erupt. I wonder what he means about making them listen? Make who listen? How? My questions now are similar to the ones I asked Norton when I returned from the women’s peace camp in New York in the summer of 1984. Similar also to the ones I asked him when we were on trial for trespassing at Nectaral Plaza on Good Friday, the questions that threatened our relationship.

      I flash Corey a conciliatory smile. “Your dad was a skeptic, too.”

      His response is quick, automatic. “Yeah, well, a lot of good that did him . . . or us.”

      I hold back, careful not to injure him like Norton and I injured each other with words.

      He curls his hands into fists. “Mom kept Dad’s secrets, but after she passed, I found his journal. It’s all there. All documented. I know everything.”

      My heart stops beating. He knows everything? Does that mean Chloe, Norton’s wife, knew about our relationship? Is that what Corey’s rage is about? Do I really want to know?

      “That was a long time ago,” I mumble.

      He reaches across the table and his hand bumps against my mug. Coffee splatters onto my blouse. He leans forward, points his finger at me.

      “It’s not over,” he says through gritted teeth. “Mark my words, Sylvia, it’s not anywhere near over.”

      FOUR

      1984

      By summer, my love for Norton was more intense than the hot sun; it bloomed brighter than the wildest and most colorful profusion of flowers ever seen in the Midwest. I loved the way his skin stretched down over his high cheekbones and settled into either frown or smile lines on the outsides of his lips, the way his green eyes twinkled with kindness and burned with anger, the tingle of his fingertips on my skin. But as my love for him deepened, so too did my guilt. He was married. His wife, Chloe, thought we were just friends. He had a son, Corey, who was only four years old and needed his father. Many times I told myself I had to let him go, but I never could. Instead, I drank.

      A widespread sense that summer, among our activist friends, was that the world was a more dangerous place than ever. Norton and I, to counter our fear that we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation, went to more rallies, protests, sit-ins. We drank more. We made love with more intensity. Our passion for each other and our passion for saving the planet were indistinguishable. We saw ourselves as the warp and woof of a global tapestry without understanding that its design was too complex for us to grasp.

      I decided that summer to go to the Seneca Women’s Peace Camp in New York, which had been established near a military base where nuclear weapons were being stored. How could I not do my part when women at a similar camp at Greenham Common in England had been protesting the planned deployment of those weapons since 1981? I didn’t know that my decision to go would mark the beginning of the end for Norton and me.

      He came to see me off. “Do what you have to do.” That was his farewell to me as I boarded one of two buses that would take ninety-nine of us Monrow City women to New York. His voice was firm and he smiled, but the lines around his lips drooped, and he looked unwell. I didn’t think of it as an omen at the time. I just thought it meant he would miss me. The bus drove slowly away from the parking lot, and I stuck my arm out the window and waved and waved until he was an indistinguishable dot on the landscape. Then I settled back in my seat.

      “Welcome, ladies!” Jennifer, the twenty-something, blue-jean-clad intern from the Peace and Justice Coalition, stood at the front of the bus with a microphone. “Thousands of women will be going to the camp between now and Labor Day, but our contingent is the largest.”

      Expressions of pride rippled through the bus.

      “Will there be enough room for us?” It was Maddie, our resident worrywart.

      Jennifer flicked her hand in what could be interpreted as being either dismissive or reassuring, depending on how you felt about the question or the questioner. “The camp is on a fifty-two-acre farm,” she said. “Plenty of space to accommodate us. But, of course, the size of the camp is nothing compared to the eleven-thousand-acre Seneca Army Depot.”

      “How many nuclear weapons are stored at the depot?” This time Maddie shouted louder and with a lot more anxiety in her voice.

      Jennifer smiled, but she also let out a barely disguised sigh, like she thought everyone on the trip should already know the answer to that question. “The military neither denies nor confirms the presence of nuclear weapons,” she said. “So we don’t know.”

      We passed some middle school boys playing soccer on a grassy field and that got me thinking about the children who lived near the Seneca depot. What would happen to them if there were a nuclear attack or, God forbid, a nuclear accident? I’d read that there were emergency evacuation plans only for on-base personnel.

      Mary Lou, in the seat next to me, poked me with her elbow. “If I lived in the town of Romulus, I sure wouldn’t want to be so close to the depot.” I attributed Mary Lou’s propensity for giving voice to my thoughts to years of experience, given that she was eighty-nine years old and a great-grandmother of six, but