Twilight

by Nancy Pickard

  “There will be time for vegetables,” I said to the waitress.

  “You’re working too hard, Jenny,” she said, pad in hand. “I can always tell when you’re working too hard, because you say things that make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

  “What you do is hard work,” I retorted. “By comparison, what I do is play.”

  She thought about that, tapping her pencil on the pad. Finally, she said, “Now you’re making sense, so maybe you’re not working too hard.”

  “Anybody ever hears us, they’ll think we’re both nuts.”

  “That makes sense.”

  We both burst out laughing at the same time, and then she went to put in my order. A television was playing over in the corner by the cashier, who was, I couldn’t help but notice, avoiding my eyes. It reminded me of how some of my volunteers had acted that day at Judy’s House, in the wake of the previous night’s newspaper. Evidently the cashier, a woman who ordinarily greeted me by name and often dropped by my table to gossip, had read it, too. Her behavior made me kind of glad there was nobody else I knew in the diner at that time. I do so hate to embarrass people when they’re eating.

  While I waited for my burger to cook, I went to the pay phone outside the rest rooms, and called Port Frederick Memorial to check on David’s condition. Asleep, they told me, but they wouldn’t tell me the confirmed nature of his injuries. I’d have to wait to talk to the doctor about that, they said, especially since I wasn’t a relative. I returned to my table feeling only partly reassured. Why couldn’t they just say, “broken clavicle, concussion, contusions?”

  The waitress came over to pour me a cup of coffee.

  “Hear about that weird thing out on the highway?”

  “What thing?” I asked her, playing dumb.

  “Some damn fools put up barricades on both sides of the highway over there at Crowley’s Greek. Not just highway barricades, either, mind you, but big fat tree limbs, so nobody could get around. It was all over the TV news tonight. Somebody got hurt because of it, some teenager, but they wouldn’t give out his name on the air. Maybe his family didn’t know about it yet, or something. And they had an interview with this good-looking environmentalist guy, who said his group didn’t have anything to do with it.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “Like that doesn’t tell you right away that they did it, right? I mean why would he bother to go on television and deny it, unless they really did it?”

  “Well, maybe because they really didn’t?”

  “You” think? He was cute. Muscles out to here.”

  “He used to live here,” I told her. “His name’s Lewis Riss, at least I suppose that’s who it was—”

  “Yeah, yeah, that was his name. You know him?”

  “He was a reporter here in town.” I smiled up at her. “Want me to bring him by for a cup of coffee sometime?”

  “Yeah, do that,” she said. I happened to know that she was long married and the mother of twins, a substitute grade-school teacher during the week, and a part-time waitress at the diner on weekends. “Like I’ve got time for a lover, right?”

  “Was there any news about the festival?”

  She pulled several little white plastic buckets of cream out of her skirt pocket and handed them to me for my coffee. “Yeah, but you don’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  When she came back with my food, I had to ask, however, “On the news, did they mention my name?”

  “Well, you little swell-headed thing, you.” She grinned, but it was sympathetic. “Yes, but like I said, you don’t want to know.”

  I stared glumly at the food that was supposed to cheer me up.

  When she returned at the right time with my cherry pie, I asked, “Did you happen to notice if there was an interview with Miss Lucille Grant on the news?”

  I didn’t have to explain to her whom I meant; Miss Grant was legendary in town, both among her former students and among all the teachers, past and present.

  “I don’t believe so, although I didn’t pay much attention to the sportscast Any chance she’d have been on that?”

  We smiled at each other, knowing the obvious answer to that one.

  And then I stared glumly at the pie, because if Miss Grant hadn’t been on the news that evening, it meant that the plan in which I had enlisted her must have failed to work. I was going to have to call her over the weekend and apologize for putting her to the trouble of attempting it.

  I left the Beantown feeling heavier, in all ways.

  You’d have thought I’d have a car phone.

  Considering how many details and events and people I had to be coordinating at any one time in my job, it would have seemed sensible. But I didn’t. A lot of people, including my husband, thought I ought to. They claimed I’d be safer, for one thing, and more efficient, for another. I didn’t deny they could be right, but I still wanted an island of space and time in which I could travel about alone with my thoughts. And I wanted to discourage any false sense of urgency in myself. I don’t have anything against car phones; actually, I think they’re fun. But, personally, I figure there are very few things that can’t wait long enough for me to get to a grounded phone. And in the meantime, I would have time to think things over, learn patience, calm down …

  My big greasy supper left me sleepy. If I’d had a phone in my car, I might have settled for calling the hospital again to insist that they define David’s condition for me, so that I could go home without that to worry about it. Instead, I drove back into town, back to the hospital, to see him for myself. And if I hadn’t done that, I might not have realized how uneasy I had been feeling, all along, about the fact that neither of us had stayed behind to watch over him, to make sure that they gently transferred him into his bed, and to let him know—somewhere in the sleeping, unconscious part of him—that somebody cared enough to stay with him.

  He was sleeping in the darkened room.

  His face looked relaxed, and as a result, the handsome man he would soon become was more than just a hint in the strong lines of his face, in the long eyelashes, the good nose, and the fine, strong chin.

  I left him a note, promising to come back in the morning with Geof, a promise David wouldn’t necessarily appreciate, of course, and 1 knew that. But somebody, besides Geof, had to start saying she cared, and saying it more directly. If, indeed, she did care?

  Yes, I did.

  I signed it, “Love, Jenny.”

  What in the world would he think of that?”

  One of the night nurses turned out to be someone I knew, and he didn’t hesitated to confirm: “Cracked clavicle, contusions.” David didn’t even have a concussion, it turned out, although the impact had knocked him silly. He ought to be able to leave the hospital the next day, my nurse friend told me.

  I looked forward to it.

  “Unless you’ve arrested somebody,” I said to Geof, when he tiptoed into our bedroom around midnight, “I’m too tired to listen until morning.” I was in bed, under the covers, my eyes open only just enough to see him in the soft glow of the light I’d left on for him in the hall.

  “Great,” he said, as he started to get undressed. “Because we haven’t, and I’m too tired to talk about it tonight.”

  “I saw David.”

  “I know, I saw your note.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah, I just missed you.”

  We smiled at one another. Shook our heads. Laughed a little at ourselves. Managed, barely, to discuss the kid’s condition.

  Then there was silence, while he finished stripping.

  While he was removing his last sock, I said, “Have I ever told you that this is one of my favorite parts of the day? That I really love watching you get undressed?”

  He looked up. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That is a very sexy thing to say, and if I weren’t a hundred and thirty-two years old, I might do something about it.”

 
“Well, you know what they say,” I commented, as he lifted his side of the covers and climbed in, my own personal big, naked man, “when couples have a good thing together, they have sex like crazy for the first few years, because the excitement of falling in love gets their adrenaline going. But then things calm down, and the endorphins take over, so they feel more warm and peaceful and loving, and they have less sex, but what they do have is very intimate and sweet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I heard somebody say it on TV.”

  “Well, it must be true then.”

  He positioned his left arm so that I could lay my head on his shoulder. I dropped my right hand onto his chest, and then he curved both of his arms lightly around me. We lay there like that, quietly, for awhile. Then he said, with a smile I could hear in the dark, “Plenty of endorphins around here.”

  “I should say so.”

  “But I’m expecting a fresh shipment of adrenaline first thing in the morning.”

  I smiled into the soft hair in his chest, kissed him, yawned, and fell asleep, feeling a sense of comfort that no cheeseburger could ever give me.

  In the morning—postadrenaline rush—we posed naked together in front of the full-length mirror on our closet door.

  “Look at this one,” I bragged, pointing to the bruise on the outside of my right knee, and then to my thigh and shoulder on the same side, all evidence of what happened when a human body got sandwiched between a Jaguar and a street full of cobblestones. “And these.”

  “Pretty impressive,” Geof conceded, “but don’t forget these,” and he turned around so that certain scars on his back were visible in the glass.

  “Not fair,” I protested. “You always win with those.”

  “What else have you got?” he offered generously.

  I held the newly abraded back of my hand to the glass, and I offered him a view of a spreading bruise on my rump, which I had earned by falling among the trees in the woods the day before. “Oh,” I said, “and there’s still this.” The long, healing red stripe on my left arm, I meant. “And this.” I pointed to an old wound, from a battle in a lobster pound, of all places.

  “It’s a good thing we had sex under the covers this morning,” Geof observed, “because if I’d seen you in the light, I would have been afraid to touch you. So, okay, I guess I’ll have to concede the honors for this week,” he admitted, “but overall …”

  “Oh, yes,” I cooed, reassuringly, “overall, you’re much the worse for wear, darling. As any self-respecting police officer ought to be. Why, if I had all the scars you do, I’d want to be paid for the job, too.”

  “That’s more like it,” he harrumphed, with a mock braggadocio that made us both break into laughter. I gently stroked his poor, scarred back; he sweetly kissed all my new bruises. On the way to the shower, I limped a bit more dramatically than I needed to, just to remind him whose pains were fresher.

  But when the soap stung the back of my hand, I was sorry I had won the contest.

  “Yes, you can go home with us, as soon as the doctor releases you,” Geof said, for at least the second time, to David later that morning at the hospital. The kid was groggy, stiff, alternately cranky and docile. He complained that every time he moved, his shoulder hurt, and his head ached, and both sides of his body felt like …

  “… somebody beat on me with a two-by-four.”

  Geof and I exchanged looks, I from my post in a green vinyl armchair in a corner by the window, and Geof by the other side of David’s bed, where my husband stood, looking endearingly awkward and ill at ease. We seemed to be exchanging glances a lot lately, he and I, but then we often did where David Mayer was concerned. Those glances struck me as being disconcertingly parental.

  If David had been alert and feeling up to par, he’d have caught that glance and demanded an explanation of it. As it was, he was frowning down at the sheet on top of him, unhappily plucking at it with his fingers, and so he missed the latest glance.

  “David,” Geof said, “I can tell you some things about what happened last night, and I will, but first I need for you to tell me everything you remember—”

  “I was born—”

  “From the point when Jenny got off your motorcycle and she walked up to the Kennedys’ house to get a Band Vid. Start there, would you?”

  Surprisingly, he cooperated with little fuss, and he told a simple, straightforward tale: of deciding to test a sudden stop at the bottom of the hill, of revving up his engine, roaring down—”

  “How fast were you going?” Geof asked.

  “Not very, I wasn’t even up to the speed limit, there wasn’t enough space for that.” He looked at Geof. “I’m not crazy, you know. I wasn’t out to kill myself. I knew I’d better keep it at a low speed, or when I braked, I might go over the handlebars. I just wanted to see … what if somebody did stop at the sign … and then they were accelerating at a normal speed down the hill … and suddenly somebody stepped off the trail onto the road in front of them … could they stop in time? So I probably wasn’t going over twenty, tenty-five miles an hour, if that much.”

  “So, you got to the bottom, you braked—”

  “No, I didn’t even get to the bottom, and it all happened before I could do what I planned to do. It was like out of nowhere! Suddenly there was this log flying into me. I mean, I saw it! It, like, practically landed in my fucking lap! And it wasn’t like it hurt me or anything, but it startled the shit out of me, and I just … lost it.”

  “Anybody would,” I offered.

  He gave me a sardonic look. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You mean, you lost control of the bike? What did you do, brake? Lose control of the steering, what?”

  “Like, everything!” David exclaimed, turning his indignation from me to Geof. “I don’t know what I did, I just did everything wrong, that’s all I know, and the bike’s suddenly rolling out from under me, and my hands are flying off the handlebars, and my legs are flying out like I’m on a horse and I’ve lost my stirrups, and I’m eating air, and I’m thinking, oh shit, oh shit”

  “And then—”

  “And then I wake up in a fucking ambulance.” He started to turn his neck toward me, but the movement cost him. “Ouch! Dammit!” He settled for merely swiveling his eyes in their sockets again. “And the only thing I see is her looking down on me like I’m in a casket and she’s all worried-looking and pretending she’d, like, miss me.”

  “I’m such a good little actress,” I said dryly.

  “Do you recall seeing any people, David?”

  “No.”

  “Any cars, another motorcycle, any kind of vehicle?”

  “No, I’ve been thinking about it. No.”

  “Could you hear anything, over the noise of the bike?”

  “Are you kidding? I couldn’t hear a train behind me if I was running on the tracks and it was gaining on me. Now you know everything I know. But I don’t know everything you know, right?”

  Geof gingerly sat down on the edge of the bed. “No, you don’t. There are two things you don’t know. The first one is that while this was happening to you, the highway was blocked off, barricaded from both directions, so no traffic could get through.”

  “What does that mean?” David asked.

  “Well, one thing it means is that whoever did this to you was able to get away with doing it without being seen.”

  David absorbed that for a moment, then looked up again. “Do you mean somebody planned this, just to wreck me?”

  Geof shook his head. “Probably not, David. We think the blockade was related to the issue of the changes that Jenny’s involved in making at the trail crossing. There are people, maybe she told you, who don’t want anything done to it. They may have wrecked you as a warning. Sort of, ‘Don’t mess with the trail, or you’ll get hurt,’ that sort of craziness. That’s one possibility. Although, I’ll admit that we haven’t heard from any protest group, which would ordinarily be the way they’d operat
e. Of course, they may have backed off from taking any responsibility, once you got hurt. Maybe, from the point of view of their leaders, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “I hate these people,” David said with feeling.

  “But there’s another theory, which is that it might have been done by people who want to prove the trail crossing is dangerous, and that it should be fixed.”

  “I hate those people, too,” he said with equal fervor.

  “Got any other theories?” I piped up.

  Geof smiled over at me. “No. You?”

  I shook my head. He had asked me to let him put off explaining the status of the investigation until he could tell both David and me at the same time. So the kid and I were hearing it first together. “Did you locate Lew Riss or any of the other folks from First Things First?” I asked him.

  “Who’s that?” David wanted to know. “What’s that?”

  “Ecoterrorists,” Geof informed him. “And their leader, who just happens to be an old pal of Jenny’s.”

  “I guess any friend of hers,” the kid said, “is not necessarily a friend of mine.”

  “I hope that’s not true.”

  “What?” both men asked, not having heard me.

  “Never mind.”

  Geof continued with his explanation of First Things First: “They were heavily involved in establishing God’s Highway to begin with, and now they’re back, because they’ve heard some people want to change it.”

  “Some people,” David said darkly. “You said there were two things I didn’t know—”

  “Right.” Geof took a breath. “The second one is that one of the doctors here—the guy who saw you in the emergency room—doesn’t think you got that line of bruises from the wreck. He thinks you got them from being beaten up. He thinks somebody came up, while you were knocked out on the pavement, and—in his words—whaled on you with some object, a branch off a tree, maybe.”

  David blinked several times and didn’t speak.

  “Do you remember anything like that?” I asked him gently.

  He pressed his lips together, closed his eyes, then opened them and stared out the window.