Passing Through Midnight Page 3

  "Can you do better than stick people?"

  "No."

  "Then I'd rather have you wash my car."

  His eyes lit up. "Nice car. Seventy-one, nine-eleven E, two-point-two liter, fuel-injected, five-speed. It's really nice."

  The boy knew his cars. "I bought it secondhand when I was still in college. It's not worth what a Carrera that same year would be, but someday, who knows…"

  "You really want me to wash it?"

  "If you want to."

  "I'm not five years old. I don't work for cookies, you know."

  "I'll bake you a cake."

  "I'd rather have a pie."

  "Cherry or apple?"

  "Pecan."

  She sucked air through her teeth. "You drive a hard bargain," she said, holding out her hand to make the deal.

  "I know," he said, smiling. He took her hand and shook it briefly.

  For a teenager to talk confidently, even joke with an adult, was a treat for Dorie. Most teens of her experience were resentful and distrusting of adults, foul tempered and mean. It was a huge relief to know that not all her basic instincts about people had been destroyed.

  They sat quietly for a minute or two. She was about to get up and take her leave when she felt him looking at her.

  "It's not polite to stare," she said quietly, resisting the urge to ride her face from him.

  "Sorry," he said, looking away. But then he looked back and admitted, "I thought you'd look worse."

  He opened and closed his mouth as if he were trying to gobble them back in, but the words were out. He frowned, looked away, and muttered another apology.

  "Actually, I did look worse," she said, taking pity on him. "I looked like a blue raccoon with a mouth full of nuts a couple of months ago."

  "Who did it to you?" he asked, his eyes softening with concern.

  "No one," she said, a bit surprised by his assumption. "It was an accident. In a car." It was considerably more complicated than that, but she'd found that if she didn't think or talk about the rest of it, she could imagine it to be something as simple as a mishap on the freeway. "That's why I'm here. To rest and get my strength back."

  "Man," he said, nearly going limp with relief. "We thought someone had beat the tar out of you, and you were hiding out here. A gangster maybe."

  "A gangster? Oh, because I'm from Chicago?" she said, smiling easily this time. "Jeez, I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment. You guys were probably having a grand old time over there watching for black limos and people with violin cases."

  "Not just us. Everyone in Colby thinks you're some wise guy's girlfriend," he said, shattering her illusion of invisibility, of being no one in Nowheresville. Hell, she was practically a damn celebrity. "We must get five or six calls a day from people wanting to know if we've seen you yet. We know when you hit the IGA. Bax thinks I have ESP cuz I can tell when he's going to get sugar cookies or chocolate chip or peanut butter. Beforehand, you know? Depending on what you buy that day."

  "Oh, this is just great," she said, leaning her head against the chain that suspended the swing. "I should have known this would happen. Small towns live on gossip. How could I have been so stupid, so… Now I'll have to leave."

  "No you won't," he said, looking at her as if she'd suddenly lost her mind. "Just tell the truth. It's boring. No one'll care about a plain old car accident. They'll forget all that gangster stuff in a week. And stop wearing those glasses and the scarf and that coat. You don't look that bad."

  Her hand automatically covered the thin red scars on her right cheek and chin. "I don't?"

  "No," he said, amazed that she'd think so. "In fact, my dad's gonna be real happy that you're pretty. From the way Frank Schulman was talking, he thought you were going to scare Bax to death."

  Frank Schulman? The real estate agent. Why, that had been weeks ago. Maybe it was time to take another good look in the mirror.

  Fletcher was making a vague gesture with his index finger as he said, "You oughta do something about your hair though. It looks pretty weird."

  She touched the stubble of hair growing at her left temple.

  "I was going to stay inside until it grew out again."

  "All summer?" He was aghast.

  She could only look at him, her mind shuffling down a path she'd been avoiding for a long time. People. How long could she avoid them? She was vain enough to admit that the scars and the limp were good excuses to hide from the public eye. But what would happen when her leg was strong again and the scars faded and her hair was the same length on both sides of her head? What then?

  "I think I'll go in and take a nap," she said, circumventing a decision. Sleep was the answer to most of her questions these days. A major symptom of depression, she knew, but when something worked…

  "Can I come back?" she heard Fletcher ask as she opened the screen door. "Not every day, but some other time, maybe?"

  "Sure." Then, as she grew drowsy in the doorway, she remembered their deal. "Don't forget my car."

  "I won't."

  She felt as if a vampire had sucked all the life and energy from her body. She could barely close the door and climb the stairs to bed. She flopped down on the mattress, knowing that such instant and complete fatigue was telling her something, but she ignored it. She was cold. She sat up and yanked the blanket from the foot of the bed and rolled herself into it.

  "My dad's gonna be real happy that you're pretty."

  The words floated through her mind twice before it blocked out everything.

  "Pretty, huh?" she speculated several hours later in front of the bathroom mirror. She'd slept the afternoon away, waking with just enough time to refill Baxter's cookie can before she heard the big black and silver truck turn into the drive.

  She'd watched from the windows as Gil and the boys got out of the truck and, as usual, she held her breath until she knew that they weren't going to come to the door.

  Fletcher's behavior had puzzled her. He climbed out and waited for Baxter to follow, watched him skip to the porch for his cookie can, and then the three of them walked out into the field behind the house without a backward glance. Hadn't he told his father about their encounter? Hadn't he told him that she was pretty under her disguise?

  Again she scanned her face in the mirror. All she could see were the scars, red and ugly on her cheek and along her chin.

  "Kid, you got really rotten taste in women," she said, turning out the light and walking away.

  It was still early, maybe nine o'clock, and with so much sleep that afternoon she wouldn't be returning to bed anytime soon. She'd already washed her dishes, part of the get-with-it program she'd started the week before. She wasn't much of a TV person, not having the time to watch much before now. She generally read when she couldn't sleep. Technical, nonfiction sort of material about blood gases, shock trauma, burn therapy —but she had no interest in it.

  She opened the front door and took in a deep, satisfying breath of the sweet spring night. Without really intending to, she pushed the screen door open and stepped out on the porch. The swing looked inviting, lit softly from the lights within the house.

  She sat in it sideways, tucking her long terry robe about her bent knees and around her bare feet, huddling close against the chill and the constant breeze that blew across the prairie. She looked up at the stars as they dangled quiet and peaceful in the black sky. They sparkled like so many crystals in the window of a New Age bookstore, mesmerizing her, clearing her mind. Once again she felt small and insignificant, unseen from the stars, hidden and safe in the night.

  For a long time she sat motionless, satisfied to let time and the world pass her by.

  Gil Hewlett watched her from the fenced pasture not two hundred feet away.

  He hadn't meant to disturb her. He'd bid his family good night an hour earlier and had gone up to bed. He couldn't sleep. He stood watching the dim lights in the distance for some time before he took the back stairs down to the kitchen for a drink of water.

  He could hear the television program Matthew was watching in the next room. The back door stood open to the cool night air. He'd passed through it on an impulse.

  Unable to see the still, green wheat in the fields or distinguish the shapes of cows as they huddled together on the horizon, he was greeted with vast empty space. Miles and miles of nothing but him and the earth, the sky hanging low, and the stars seeming to be within his reach.

  His mind began to wander, and so did his feet.

  If he had to describe himself in one word, it wouldn't be deep. But sometimes, and usually at odd times, "life as it might have been" would creep up and smack him in the back of his head.

  He relived the heartache of letting loose each of his dreams, one by one. Carving them up, reshaping them to fit reality. Compromising them, trading them off, finally terminating them altogether. The bitterness rose up within him like black tar boiling over in its pot.

  With an effort, an effort that was less and less stressful with the passage of time, he pushed that darkness from his heart. He gathered the good things in his life close to him. His boys, his friends, his home. He counted himself a lucky man.

  Some things just weren't meant to be, he had reminded himself wistfully, looking up to find that he had roamed a considerable distance from the house—more than halfway to the Averback farm, as a matter of fact.

  It was no longer a cluster of lights on the skyline, but homey windows with warm glowing lights shining through them. A familiar sight from his childhood. How many times had he walked the mile to the Averbacks', crossing the road, jumping the fence, picking his way carefully through the pasture?

  He did it then from habit and was smiling to himself when he heard the screen door open on the Averbacks' front porch, just as it had a
thousand times before when they had seen him coming.

  Only he wasn't a kid anymore, and the Averbacks were gone. The figure on the porch was held in the shadows, but it was unmistakably that of a woman. She sort of floated toward him, to the end of the porch and sat down.

  He watched her for a few minutes and when she didn't move again, he did. He took slow steps, quiet steps, until he reached the fence. From there he watched her stare at the stars, motionless, a part of the night, almost invisible in the dark.

  He couldn't imagine being alone in a house, ill and weak. Who was this woman who had no one to care for her? No family, no friends. Why would she travel from what she knew to a remote town full of strangers and lock herself up in a house there? It was a puzzle that intrigued him.

  Watching her, thinking about her, recalling Fletcher's tale of his encounter with her over supper that evening, Gil was once again reminded, forcefully and profoundly, of how lucky a man he really was. Failed dreams and all.

  "You couldn't sleep either, huh?" he asked, speaking as softly as he could so as not to frighten her. Not that it did any good. She let loose a little yelp and was on her feet in one startled movement. "Sorry. Clearing my throat would have scared you just as bad. I figured why waste the breath."

  Dorie clasped her hands in front of her as they started to shake. She recognized his voice and could vaguely perceive his tall form in the moonlight. She didn't speak—couldn't with the huge lump of fear stuck in her throat. She watched him take the fence in one graceful leap, and fought her impulse to run inside and lock the doors as he crossed the yard toward her.

  "Nice night for stargazing," he commented, coming up the broad set of steps in the middle of the porch. "I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd stop by and borrow a cup of sugar," he said, covering all the excuses he could think of for dropping in unexpectedly.

  She didn't smile, and she still looked frightened enough to make him wish that he'd gone home without disturbing her. Yet, something kept him moving toward her.

  "I'm sorry I startled you," he said again lightly. "I was out walking and found myself in the middle of the pasture there. I… thought I'd come see how you were."

  "I'm fine," she said. And she might have been if her heart hadn't tripped into a snappy tattoo—as any woman's might in the presence of a handsome man with eyes that asked questions and took answers indiscriminately.

  To tell the truth, she might have managed several more lifetimes without seeing him again. She wasn't going to try to convince herself that the jitters within her were due to his being an unknown in her life. She knew after his last visit that she was attracted to him—poring over old pictures of him, waiting and watching for him each day, enjoying the way he walked, listening for his voice. However, being attracted to any man, ever again, wasn't part of the question mark her life was in at that moment.

  "Shew. Those fields must have gotten bigger since I was a kid. I used to run across them without getting winded. They wore me out tonight. Can I just sit here on the swing for a few minutes? To catch my breath?"

  "Of course."

  She wasn't going to make this easy for him. There was no offer of a beer or a glass of water forthcoming. She simply stood there holding her elbows while he made himself comfortable.

  "Spring at last, huh?" he said, slapping his hands down on his knees as he scanned the new season in the darkness. He could feel her watching him.

  "Seems like it," she said when his gaze returned to her, clearly expecting some comment. "It's been a long winter."

  Weather discussed, and their acquaintance too short to debate politics or religion, they fell into an uneasy quiet. They were both completely aware of the other, their size and shape in the space around the swing; each subtle movement or the lack thereof; breathing patterns. Dorie was afraid he could hear her heart pounding.

  "I've spent a lot of time in this swing," he remarked, simply to break the stillness. His voice seemed to carry for miles.

  "With Beth?"

  He turned his face to her sharply. She was frozen with embarrassment. Where had that question come from?

  "You know about Beth?" he asked, amazed but not offended.

  "From pictures. In the house," she stammered, feeling like an idiot. "There's a prom picture."

  He nodded. "They must have taken the wedding pictures with them."

  "Where are they? The Averbacks. They left so many things here, it's as if they're coming back soon. As if they're away on vacation."

  "Mike and Henry both moved to Wichita after college, and then… after Beth died, old Henry and Janice moved there, too, to be closer to the grandchildren. They visit three or four times a year, but they usually stay over at our place," he said. "I think there are just too many memories for them over here."

  Bending her knees and lowering herself into the space on the swing beside him, she asked softly, "Did Beth die here?"

  He nodded.

  "How sad," she said, leaning against the back of the swing, feeling a deep and wholly unexpected sympathy for the Averbacks.

  She had received a considerable amount of on-the-job training in dealing with other people's grief, along with a certain sense of failure in herself when she was a part of it—but she didn't know the Averbacks, had never met them. And yet she felt Beth's loss as if it were very much in the here and now, and very close to home.

  Perhaps it was the new view of death she'd been given during the accident that was affecting her objectivity.

  "Was she very young?"

  "Too young to die, but at the end, it was almost a relief," he said, looking out into the night, seeming to speak from far away. "Sometimes it's hard to remember all the good times. All the years before she got sick."

  Her feet were cold. She pulled them up and buried them in her bathrobe, pulling the muscles of her left leg to the point of aching.

  "The two of you remained close then, after the prom." It was more a question than a comment, but for some strange reason he was frowning when he turned to look at her.

  Slowly his lips twisted into an ironic little smile and his brow cleared and he nodded. "Yeah," he said, almost amused. "I guess you could say we stayed close after the prom. We made Fletcher together."

  THREE

  Dorie held her breath. She felt as if she'd stumbled into a minefield and was afraid to take her next step.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

  He shrugged. "I thought you did. Thought maybe Fletch told you this afternoon."

  "No, he… No. He didn't mention it."

  "It was a long time ago. I remarried. Had Baxter after that. Sometimes it doesn't feel like anything more than a dream," he said. Then under his breath, so softly that it could have been the wind whispering across the open fields, he muttered, "A nightmare really."

  "Well, this seems like a nice farm," she said, standing up abruptly as she changed the subject, unprepared for a snap in her leg muscles that brought tears to her eyes. She bit down on her lower lip, waiting for the pain to pass and her vision to clear. She couldn't see much beyond the dim shaft of light from the living room window, save shadows and sky. But she walked to the railing and gazed far into the darkness, distancing herself both physically and emotionally.

  She didn't want to hear about his nightmares. She didn't want to know about his pain. She had her own demons to dispel. Her own wounds to mend.

  "Do you suppose the Averbacks will ever come back here?" she asked, taking in the clean fertile smell of the High Plains, wondering at its agelessness, speculating on its indifference to the lives of those who work it.

  "No," he said, leaning back in the swing, stretching his arm across the back. His gaze took a slow upward slant along her terry-covered spine. She was tall and perhaps a little too thin. Her dark hair, the longer side facing him, caught the dull beams of light from the window, turning it into dark, lustrous strands of red. Her profile, painted with shadows and light, was fine and delicate with large almond-shaped eyes and high, prominent cheekbones. He guessed she was very beautiful once, though he thought Fletcher had understated a little when he said she "wasn't half-bad to look at" now.

  "If Fletcher decides to hang around, they'll probably leave it to him," he said.