Emmet had told her Nolan would come see her as soon as the doctor would let him. Dede ground her teeth. She did not want to have to look into Nolan’s face again. She wanted him to give her something to hate him for. It would be so much easier if she hated him. It was loving him that felt dangerous, all that talk about family and moving in together, moving to Atlanta, making it possible for her to do what she wanted to do. Were there really people who got to choose what they wanted, instead of just taking what they could get and making the best of it? Nolan had talked to her as if anything were possible. That was what he said—“With you, anything is possible!” —and Dede knew from the look in his eyes that he believed it. That was the way he loved her. She loved him too, but like that? Like the whole world could fall on her and still she’d be all right because he was with her? People like Nolan were sports of nature, loving so completely that their love satisfied everything in them.
He’s better than me, Dede thought. Nolan could make a real career with his clarinet in Atlanta, but he told her that he would move or stay in Cayro, whatever she wanted. If someone offered Dede a two-hundred-thousand-dollar rig and a route from Georgia to Arizona and back again, she’d jump at it. It wouldn’t matter if Nolan couldn’t go. Hell, it wouldn’t matter if he were lying in the street and she had to drive over him. She’d shift gears and crush his spine.
It might never have happened if she hadn’t already had that gun, and that was Billy Tucker’s fault. But then, if not for Billy Tucker, would she have ever taken up with Nolan at all? Maybe all of it had been predictable. That silly waitress from Goober’s didn’t matter. She was nothing. Nolan didn’t care about her and Dede knew it. When he looked at Dede with the gun in her hand, his face said, All right, shoot me if you have to, kill me if that’s what you need. What kind of man stood still for a woman to shoot him?
“He’s crazy,” Dede had told Emmet.
“Yeah,” Emmet agreed. “He loves you.”
Two parts the moon, one part loneliness-and the rest? Dirty-blond hair or the smile of the beloved, Nolan’s smile when he lay on top of her, his chin between her breasts.
In the jail late at night, Dede heard women crying. Emmet had put her in a cell by herself, but that didn’t stop her from hearing a woman down the corridor sobbing for her baby-her child? Some man?—and another woman cursing at her. Whatever they’d done, they couldn’t be as crazy as she was. They were like Delia, Dede thought, the kind of woman who could screw up her whole life for love of a man, but then Delia sat at that table and spoke about Clint as if he were not what Dede had always thought he was, contemptible and evil.
“Don’t you live your life the way I have,” Delia had said. “Don’t shut yourself off to love. Don’t bury your heart in a hole.”
Dede lay awake and listened to the women. My heart is a hole, she thought. I have never let myself use it for love the way Nolan does, never risked everything and known what I was doing. She curled up and pushed her face into her pillow. With that woman she had never seen, she cried for the one she loved.
When Cissy got up the next morning, Rosemary was in the back garden walking around Delia’s worktables, admiring the potting bench and the vegetable patch. Cissy poured a cup of coffee and went out to join her.
“Didn’t you sleep?” Cissy asked.
“I slept a lot, on the plane and here.” Rosemary nodded toward the house. “I’m doing fine. Just look at what your mother has accomplished back here.” She took out a cigarette. “Doesn’t appear to me like she sleeps at all.”
“She don’t, not much anyway.” Cissy sat on the steps and sipped her coffee. “She’s always out here when she’s not at the shop. She putters and gardens and refinishes furniture. Never idle, that’s Delia.”
“A happy woman.” Rosemary looked up at the pecan trees.
“You think?” Cissy watched Rosemary walking carefully on the wet grass. “She keeps busy. She’s always doing something.”
“How about you?” Rosemary came to the steps and sat down beside Cissy. “You keep busy?”
“Busy enough. I guess you heard what Amanda said last night.”
“I didn’t hear much, just you and your sister going at each other as usual. Seems to me you’re both getting too old for that, but it’s not my business.” She raised an eyebrow. “Delia told me you were going to the community college, working a little and crawling around under the ground whenever you got the chance. All that true?”
“True enough.” Cissy rocked on her heels. “But I quit the job, and school is stupid. I took two classes, but not with anything in mind. I don’t know why I bother.”
“You could do something else.”
“Like what?” Cissy said, but she looked at Rosemary hopefully.
“You could come back to Los Angeles with me. Go to UCLA, if you could get in.” Rosemary gave her a meaningful look. “No sense even talking about it, though, unless you really want to. You’d have to think about what you’re willing to be serious about, what you care about.” Cissy set the cup down on the step and dropped her head. “I don’t know what I care about. If I knew that, I could figure everything else out. ”
Rosemary poked Cissy’s shoulder. “Delia says you’ve been doing this caving a long time. Says you’ve been going out to those caves for years, long before you started doing it with these girls Amanda was talking about. Seems like you might care about that, about caves and all. What’s that? Spelunking? Archaeology maybe, or geology, minerals and such. You could check it out, see what interests you.”
Cissy stared openmouthed into Rosemary’s impassive face. “Are you serious?”
“I am completely serious.”
“How would we pay for it?” Cissy tried not to let her excitement show.
“We could manage something. You are Randall Pritchard’s daughter, after all.” Rosemary rubbed her temple. “Seems to me we have to make sure that Dede is all right, and then there’s a lot of paperwork and preparation involved. You don’t just walk out of one life and into another. It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“This Delia’s idea?” Cissy sat back on the step. “She ask you to talk to me about this?”
“Your mother and I discussed you, yes.” Rosemary’s tone did not alter. “She loves you. Maybe you don’t know that. I remember when she hauled you back here, what you looked like after your daddy died. Like a half-drowned kitten, and Delia the mama cat that was going to drag you around by your neck till you dried out.”
Rosemary stood and went up the steps. “You think about things. Delia said it might take two or three days to get Dede out of jail. She wants her to talk to Nolan, and the doctor won’t let Nolan get out of bed yet. You go on your trip with your friends, but while you’re down there, you think about things. When you decide, Delia and I will talk to you about how to get what you want.”
“You’ll play fairy godmother?” Cissy said to Rosemary’s back as she went through the door.
“You be good to your mama,” Rosemary called back. “You pay attention for a change.”
Cissy walked to Nolan’s house on uncertain feet. “How’s he doing?” she asked Tacey.
“Better than me,” Tacey told her. “Better than me. I’m going to the store. You stay with him for a while. And don’t wake Nadine up if you can avoid it. She was up and down all night after you girls got out of here.”
Cissy hesitated at Nolan’s door, but she could see his feet moving under the covers. “You awake?” she asked, and he said yes right away.
She stepped in nervously, not sure what to expect. He had been asleep last night, and he looked terrible every time she peeked in. His face was pale, and a shadow of beard was already darkening his jaw. The way his eyes moved reminded her of something, but she could not think just what. The feeling was unpleasant enough to make her want to back right out of the room.
“Don’t go,” Nolan begged. “For God’s sake, Cissy, help me get some clothes on. If you help me, I can get downtown before
any of them come back.”
“Downtown?”
“To see Dede.” Nolan was trying to swing his leg over the side of the bed, but the bulky bandage above his knee made him clumsy. “If I get downtown, I can talk to Emmet, maybe see the people at the courthouse, find out how to get her out. She shouldn’t be in jail. It was all a mistake.” He got his leg off the bed.
Cissy saw that he was wearing only his underwear, that there was an ugly scrape on his left side, and that he was about to fall on his face. “Goddamn it, Nolan.” She jumped forward to catch him and shoved him back hard.
Nolan gasped. “Don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t do this. You got to help me.”
“I am helping you. Are you crazy?” Cissy pushed him back onto the pillows and pulled the sheet up. “Think for a minute. Is anybody going to listen to you if you go down there like a madman? You want to get Dede free, you got to act like a sane, thoughtful individual. You got to convince people that neither one of you is crazy.”
Nolan gaped at her. “You think?”
“Yes, I do.” His face was too pale, Cissy thought. He looked so pitiful. “You got to start thinking like a lawyer if you want to help Dede.”
Nolan put a hand up to his mouth. His eyes swept the room. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.” Then he sobbed, a hoarse, ugly sound. “God, maybe.”
Cissy put her hand on his arm and patted him awkwardly. “You know I’m right. You don’t want to get her in any more trouble. You’ve both used just about all the luck you have.”
“I messed it up,” Nolan said. “I pushed her. I made her do it. You know she didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“I know. I talked to her.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine, Nolan. She’s angry and confused and scared, and she isn’t sure what to say to you. I think she’s afraid to see you.”
“She shouldn’t be afraid of me.”
“No, she shouldn’t.” Cissy sat on the edge of the bed. Nolan wiped his eyes with the sheet.
“I asked her to marry me.”
“I know. She told me.”
“Did she tell you that’s why she shot me?”
“I figured it had a lot to do with it.”
Nolan swallowed painfully and took Cissy’s hand in his. “Well, when you figure it all out, you tell me about it. I’ll take it on trust, but I got to tell you I don’t understand it yet.”
Cissy held his eyes. “She’s afraid. Do you understand that? She thinks that marriage is the end of love, that it will steal her soul and make her hate you. She thinks that if she loves you that much, she’ll disappear into you and become someone she despises. She thinks that you’ll turn into her daddy and start to beat her, or she’ll turn into him and beat on you. She thinks she’s damned, and she’s always tried to defy that. Kind of a Paradise Lost devil-resisting-God kind of thing.”
Nolan shook his head. “All that?”
“And more,” Cissy said.
“Well, then, it’s no wonder she shot me.” He closed his eyes.
Cissy smoothed the sheet over Nolan’s hips. For an instant she wanted to kiss his forehead the way Delia used to kiss hers when she was sick. She repressed the impulse and stood up quickly. “Give yourself a little time, Nolan. Let other people handle things for a couple of days. You’d be amazed what they can accomplish if you give them the chance.”
Cissy closed the door and called Jean from Nolan’s house. “You girls want to go this afternoon?”
“Go? Can you get away?”
“I need to get away,” Cissy said. “I need to go somewhere cool, quiet, and dark. What about you?”
“Hell, yes.” Jean laughed into the phone. “I’ll talk to Mim and get back to you. If she doesn’t have to go to her mom’s place, we could do it for sure. How long can we be down before you need to get back?”
“Nothing’s going to happen for a while, they tell me, so we could go for an overnight.”
“Yes ma’am!” Jean’s voice was loud. “You get your stuff, and I’ll call you at your mom’s as soon as I check with Mim.”
Cissy nodded to herself. A lesbian, she thought. She’s a lesbian, one of two. I know two lesbians, and what does that say about me? She looked back at Nolan’s room.
“I don’t care,” Cissy said out loud. “I don’t care what they are. I don’t care who I am. I can go to Los Angeles in the fall. I can be anybody.”
In the books, when something goes wrong, they always note what led up to it, the clues and mistakes, the premonitions and warning signs. The list includes equipment not checked out, rope put away wet, batteries not replaced, people going down drunk or exhausted, and the more mundane mishaps, the maps stained with soda or mud so that the one essential passage is missed. Five hours down at Little Mouth, all three of them knew something had gone wrong, but none could have pointed to an omen.
Dede, Cissy found herself thinking. I should never have come down here with so much going on.
“I don’t understand,” Mim was saying. “We’ve been through this part before. I know it, and it’s on our list, but nothing looks the same. I don’t remember this much sand, and I sure don’t remember that rock.”
The rock was memorable, a hot dog in a bun or a phallus cradled gently between two breasts. “A dick,” Jean called it. “A dick with a lopsided head.”
A rock like that should have been in their notebooks or on one of the maps, but it was not. Somewhere in one of the initial passages they must have taken a wrong turn. The subterranean passage they thought they were following did not exist.
“Where do you think we are?” Mim whispered. Her words echoed hollowly along the naked rock above them.
“Somewhere new,” Jean said. “Somewhere we haven’t been before. We’ve got to go back, go back exactly the way we came, and look for where we went wrong.”
“Or for something we know,” Cissy said. “We need a landmark.”
“It’s not that big a cave,” Mim sounded determined to be reassuring. “And how many times have we been down here, huh? We go back a hundred feet and we’ll find something. You’ll see.”
Rock on rock, sand and shale, inclines of gray-black stone and sharp-edged slopes of knee-grinding pea gravel-there should have been something they recognized, they kept saying. On one trip they had found bright splashes of Day-Glo paint sprayed in arrows and circles in some of the first passages. Mim had complained about the kind of boys who would do that. “Got to leave their mark. Break something, deface something, mess something up that’s been clean and empty for a million years.”
At the time, Cissy agreed. The painted signs were ugly, and they burned behind her eyes when she turned away from them. Now, crawling hour after hour up a passage she could not chart, she started to imagine splashes of color and almost wept when none of them turned out to be real. I’m going to die down here, Cissy thought, then stubbornly shook her head.
An hour later Jean announced that she had to rest. “We could die down here,” she whispered. Cissy flinched. Mim giggled explosively.
“No, we can’t.” Mim kicked sand at the other two. “There is too much I have not done. I have not been to New York City. I have not seen the Pacific Ocean. And I have never had so many orgasms that I did not want to come again.”
Jean smiled, her teeth pearly in the indirect light of Cissy’s flashlight. “Neither have I,” she said. “Except for the last one. I have done that.”
They all grinned. Mim had a chocolate bar. Jean had saltine crackers with peanut butter. Cissy produced string cheese and salami slices. They ate intently and sipped sparingly. All of them knew there was not much water left.
“We’ll find something,” Mim said again. “We keep moving up this way, we’ve got to come out sooner or later.”
“My knees are killing me,” Jean said. “We keep moving up this way, they’re going to give out completely.”
“Better up than down,” Cissy said, though she was not sure of that.
>
Forty feet farther on, the passage cut back and reversed on itself. They began to crawl sideways, their boots slipping on broken shale and gravel.
“This is bad,” Jean said when she bumped into Cissy’s pack. She repeated it a half a dozen times in as many minutes.
Yes, Cissy thought. This was very, very bad. Behind her, Mim sobbed once and told Jean to shut the fuck up.
The next time they stopped to rest, Jean asked Mim to turn off her lamp. “We’re gonna need the light. We should use just one at a time.”
Jean’s voice sounded funny to Cissy, hoarse and shaky. Her face in the dim light seemed to have narrowed in the hours they had been crawling along the mud inclines. Cissy hoped she didn’t look that bad, but the trembling in her calves and the ache in her throat worried her. She wanted to lie down and pull dirt over herself, curl up tight and nap until God or some rescuer came for her.
“I’m cold,” Mim said.
Cissy closed her eyes. She did not have the strength to turn her head.
“You’ll be all right.” The sound of sand grating against soggy pants was loud in the hollow of the rock as Jean slid closer to Mim.
Cissy thought about how they would sit around the stove at Jean and Mim’s place afterward with the heat beating against their exhaustion while they sipped wine and repeated stories. Women made great cavers, Mim always insisted. It was the extra body fat and the endurance. Upper-body strength was important, but that could be developed. Women weight lifters would be great in caves, she said. They were muscled, flexible, and full of confidence. That was what it took, that and sheer determination.
Cissy laughed to herself. It was always easy to talk about determination and discipline while sipping wine and eating slices of chicken and cheese. There were spelunkers who deliberately starved themselves to be better able to fit through tiny crevices in the rock, who went down into the dark so thin they could crawl into passages where no one else could follow. Cissy wiggled, and a piece of limestone cracked under her boot. An echo ricocheted along the passage.
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