All The Way Back

by David Kearns

  Chapter Sixteen

  After Emily finished her pancakes, I washed the pan and the dishes, and Emily dried and put them away. The sun was fully up and offered the promise of blue skies, white sand, and dark green water.

  After we finished in the kitchen, Emily went into her bedroom. When she came out she had Sandy’s purse over her shoulder.

  “I’m ready to go,” she said.

  I have a pancake-shaped concealment holster that lets me carry a pistol inside my waistband. I was wearing the holster under a dark blue hoodie that was long enough to cover the bulge at the base of my back.

  “Should I bring my phone?” she asked.

  “I don’t plan to bring mine,” I said. “There’s no cell service on the beach. We only get it here sometimes because we’re near the top of the hill.”

  We left our phones on the kitchen counter. I plugged mine in to recharge while we were on our walk.

  We walked down the hill to the beach and went south past Josephine’s restaurant and past the houses owned by the lucky few who had property abutting the sand. Emily asked me what kind of trouble Sandy and I were in.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “I have an entire carefree day to listen to it,” Emily said.

  “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours,” I said.

  Emily smiled but didn’t say anything. It was early enough in the day that there were just a few beachcombers. It was cool, and the sun lit the beach, the water, Three Arch Rocks and the hillside in pale gold light. All in all, it seemed like a pretty good day to walk on the beach with a woman who looked like she could be Marilyn Monroe’s twin sister.

  Emily had started the walk in a pair of Sandy’s fashionable flat pumps, but she decided to take them off because the sand was so soft. She asked me to hold up, and then balanced herself by cupping her hand on my shoulder before she bent over to take off her shoes. Then she slapped the soles of the shoes together to get the sand off, and we started walking again.

  “You know I’m not supposed to talk about how I got into the program,” Emily said

  “Why don’t you tell me about what your life was like before you had any legal problems? No details. How about that?”

  She thought about it and then said “I was a star athlete in high school,” she said. “My sport was fast-pitch softball. I was a very good pitcher.”

  “What were your favorite classes in high school?” I asked.

  “Probably math, drama, and phys ed,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Math, economics, history,” I said.

  “Seems like we have math in common.”

  “We do. An affinity for numbers,” I said.

  “And we both need to carry guns now,” she said. “We have that in common, too.”

  “True.”

  “What about you?” Emily said. “What did you do before your life came off the rails?”

  “I worked with banks to track down people who took out large business loans and then ran off with the money. I liked it because I could be my own boss. I got commissions when I caught someone, especially if I was able to recover some of the bank’s money.”

  “Is that related to the problems that you and Sandy have now?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t want to spoil our walk by talking about my troubles, Emily. You sure you want to know this?”

  “Is it going to make Eric mad if you tell me?”

  “I doubt it. It’s not related to WITSEC in any way.”

  “Well, you and Sandy are my friends, so I want to know what your problems are. Isn’t that what friends do?” She looked sincere.

  “Yeah. I guess it is. The story is that someone connected to organized crime wants to punish me for something I did when I was a kid.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why?”

  “A long time ago, an enforcer for a loan shark killed my parents and then came after me, too. I had a gun, and I shot him and hid his body. I never told anyone what I did, but a few days ago the body was found. Now the loan shark knows that I can tie him to what happened to my parents, and he’s worried I’ll make trouble for him.”

  “I’m so sorry for what happened to your parents. Really.”

  “Thanks.”

  We fell silent after that. It was low tide, and the beach was about fifty yards wide and nearly flat. We found sand dollars from time to time as we walked, and Emily would pick them up, examine them closely, and put them back exactly where she’d found them. A small group of brown pelicans paralleled the beach, flying just a few feet above the peaks of the waves swelling offshore. The birds’ flight path was perfectly matched with the timing of the rise and fall of the waves to stay just above the surface of the water. Emily pointed at the birds and tugged at my arm to get my attention.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Isn’t that awesome?” I saw something that looked like childlike joy on her face, and it made me appreciate being on the beach with her that much more.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah it is.”

  I was being vigilant about watching for more of Peck’s boys and I was careful about looking over my shoulder occasionally, but I was distracted by her presence. The way that she walked, the way that her hair shined in the morning light, her elegant neck, her unblemished skin, and even the small mole beside her mouth all pushed me off balance. Her small waist, the form-fitting jeans, and the cashmere sweater accentuated her feminine shape in a way that was impossible for me to ignore.

  “I’m glad we came for a walk,” Emily said. “I’ve been in Tillamook for six months but I hadn’t really spent much time on the beach yet.”

  “I’m glad, too,” I said. “I never get tired of the view.” The peninsula for Cape Lookout State Park was clearly visible across a strip of dark blue water.

  We’d walked several miles from the township of Oceanside, too far for the casual tourists to venture from the parking lot. There were a few footprints on the sand from morning walkers, but no other evidence that humans had ever been there.

  We came to the place where I’d planned for us to turn around and head back towards my house. The landmark for the turnaround point was a hill several hundred feet tall that encroached on the beach. The hill was covered with vegetation and blackberry bushes down at beach level, but it transitioned to pines and fir trees as you ascended the slope.

  A stream a few yards wide originated at the base of the hill and cut a shallow trench across the beach on its way to the ocean. Emily’s feet were raw from walking barefoot on sand, and she stood in the stream for a minute savoring the sensation of cold water running across her sore feet and ankles. While I waited, I leaned against a sign hung by the park service between a pair of cedar posts. I’d seen the sign before, but I’d never really paid much attention to it. This time I had some time to kill, so I read what it had to say about penalties for trespassing on the hillside, about the danger of landslides, and about the potential for falling on unmaintained trails. I tipped my head back and looked upward at the top of the hill, and I wondered what would make someone want to try climbing it to begin with. Even if landslides and crumbling rock weren’t part of the equation, the hill looked pretty damned steep.

  Conveniently, that’s when the guests arrived. There were three men behind us and three in front, with each group about a hundred yards out. The men walked side by side, fanned out across the sand like they wanted to make it clear that they owned the beach. I couldn’t see any guns yet, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I would.

  If I’d been by myself I’d have noticed them quite a while ago, but Emily’s presence shortened my attention span considerably. It wasn’t that she talked too much. It was that she radiated something that tugged relentlessly at my consciousness. I wondered how long I’d have to be around her before I stopped thinking about the effect that she had on me and just shared a laugh with her or discussed ordinary things. It didn’t matter, anyway. We’d probably both be dead in the
next five minutes.

  I went over to Emily and took hold of her arm. I jerked my head towards the hill.

  “We’re going up that hill,” I said. “There are six of them, and they’ve trapped us. There’s no choice. We’re going up.”

  “What are you talking about?” Emily asked.

  “We’ve got to go now,” I said. “Right now.” She picked up her shoes, I took her hand, and we headed into the chest-high weeds that grew all the way down to the beach. We pushed through tall grass for a dozen paces before we crossed a narrow trail that looked like something that deer or coyotes might have made. We turned towards the uphill branch of the trail and ascended maybe fifty feet through huckleberry, pyracantha, and English laurel until the trail ran alongside a nearly vertical part of the hillside. Emily stopped to put her shoes on, and that was when I heard excited shouting below and behind us. I looked downhill in the direction we’d come from and saw the six men collected into a small circle on the beach. One of the men pointed up at us and yelled. I told Emily that we needed to get going, and we started moving again. We followed the trail onward and upward until I saw the reason for the sign’s warning about landslides: a chasm opened to the right of the trail, and the higher we ascended the trail, the narrower the trail became and the wider and deeper the chasm. After another fifty yards the trail was barely wide enough for one person to stand on, and the chasm which ran alongside the trail became much wider and was seemingly bottomless.

  Emily pressed ahead at a brisk pace for another hundred feet until the trail made a sharp, hairpin-shaped turn around a corner of the rock face. I would have told Emily that I’d go first to see if it was safe to go around the corner, but there was no way for me to get around her on the narrow trail anyway. I suppose I could have told her to press herself flat against the rock face, and I could have tried to work my way around her backside, but there just wasn’t enough room. Probably best that I didn’t try it, either, because if I’d been in direct contact with her body from head to toe, my brain would likely have shorted out like an overloaded fuse and I’d have fallen to my death. That was the kind of effect she had on me. Up to that point, my intoxication with her was manageable, more like a pleasant buzz than a full-on drunk, but knowing that we were likely going to be dead in the next minute or two had put a very fine point on my infatuation with her. Walking on the beach with her, or even having her aim a gun at me in her unbuttoned pajamas I could handle, but with a team of Peck’s bad boys chasing us up the trail, the fog she induced in my brain was a serious drawback. Probably better that I stay behind her anyway so I could deal with Peck’s minions when they caught up to us. If I failed, Emily would have to get her silver gun out of the silk purse that dangled stylishly from her shoulder and play for keeps on that narrowing trail to nowhere.

  Emily tipped her forehead against the rock face for a moment as if she were unsure that she could go on. Then she began to move again. She craned her neck around the corner for a half second to get a view of what was there, then pressed herself against the crumbling rock and straddled the angle of the rock face, her trailing leg stretching out straight as she searched for footing on the other side of the corner. For a fraction of a second I considered taking hold of her sweater in case she lost her balance, but I still had enough of my wits about me to know that making a grab for her would startle her and likely cause her fall. I held my breath instead. Then I saw the weight shift off of her back leg as she edged delicately around the hairpin, the leather pump on her trailing foot seeming so out of place against the dirt, the polished leather scuffing against the rock face as her left hand splayed against the crumbling rock, bits of loose soil dropping at my feet as her fingers raked across the dirt, her fingers searching for something to grip, and then she completed the rotation of her pelvis around the corner with a quick and confident move. Her trailing leg disappeared around the corner while the fingers on her left hand gripped the edge as she stabilized her balance on the far side of the turn. Then her fingers straightened out against the rock as if she were waving farewell to me, and she was gone.

  At that point, the men below us started shooting. One-two-three shots, each shot separated by about a one second delay. The gunfire was accompanied by echoes that caromed off the rock face and reverberated from the far side of the bowl-shaped hillside. The first round that they fired hit the wall twenty feet from where I stood, but the next shots came closer and then closer still, spraying me with dirt and gravel-sized rock. I wiped the debris from my eyes with the back of my forearm, and then worked my right arm, my right leg, and finally my pelvis around the corner in an intimate dance of balance, trust, and commitment with the crumbling rock and the pathetically narrow trail. Once I was on the far side of the corner, I took a few shuffling side steps with my body still pressed against the rock, taking occasional glances down at the narrow trail. As the trail widened again to a path that was several feet wide, I rotated my body to face the trail and began to move faster. Emily was already thirty or forty feet ahead of me and striding quickly upward on the widening trail.

  Under other circumstances I would have cheered our good fortune in having cheated death, but the chasm which ran alongside the trail was now wide enough to drop a house in, and where the bottom of the chasm was visible I’d estimate its depth at a hundred feet. I hustled up the trail, keeping my feet and shoulder as close to the wall as possible, moving as fast as I could manage while still watching where I put each footstep, and it occurred to me that they’d picked the perfect place to confront us on the beach. We’d gone uphill to escape, and we’d taken a trail alongside a chasm deep enough that if someone went into it they’d be unlikely to ever be found, or if a body were found, it would be assumed that they had fallen in. If Peck was strategic enough to have planned this exact spot to stage his attack on me, then I’d grossly underestimated his cleverness and I wouldn’t do that again. I wondered if he was clever enough to station people at the top of the hill along the highway that led into Oceanside. If he’d thought ahead that far, we were probably finished. Still, we weren’t going down without a fight. After all, Emily had gone to the trouble to get her silver gun. Might as well use it at least once.

  I was only a few paces behind Emily when the trail forked, offering a choice to cut left uphill on rocky soil into pine and fir trees, or stay right and follow the footpath along the edge of the chasm which now looked both bottomless and wide enough to swallow a gas station. No coming back from a fall like that.

  I told Emily “Go left! Go left!” and I watched her scramble up the slope toward the trees, losing traction in her smooth-soled leather pumps and then getting down on her hands and knees to grab at pine seedlings to aid her ascent toward the tree line. When her shoes slipped repeatedly on the dirt, Emily kicked off her pumps like a hillbilly at a summer picnic and went up the slope with athletic grace, stabilizing her purse with her right hand to keep it from swinging. By the time she disappeared into the trees, she was moving quite fast. I was moving at a dead run, too, digging into the soft soil with the toes of my running shoes and pumping my arms like pistons as I climbed to the tree line and beyond. We paused twenty yards past the first of the fir trees and maybe fifty yards down a steep bit of hillside from the highway, and I wondered again whether more of Peck’s boys were up there on the pavement waiting for us. The men below must have cell phones. If they got lucky and found cell service on the beach, they could have called ahead and posted more killers above us on Highway 131. I imagined shooters standing by the side of an anonymous sedan with lit cigarettes dangling from their lips as they checked the loads in their pistols and waited for us to be chased up the hill. Then again, cell service along that part of the coast was so erratic that cell phones were usually worthless. Perhaps there was no one above us on the highway after all. It wouldn’t be long before I found out.

  Emily was on the uphill side of a Douglas Fir that had a trunk about three feet thick. Her chest was heaving, her hair was mussed and wild, her swea
ter ripped at the left shoulder from where she’d snagged the cashmere on something. I watched her tip her head down as she put her hand into her purse and pulled out the pearl-handled pistol. Then she dropped the purse to the ground, raked the hair out of her eyes with the fingers on her free hand and let the air out of her lungs in a single big exhalation. I heard the click as her thumb flipped off the safety on her pistol. Then she looked over at me and she nodded once, slowly and deliberately.

  “Stay here,” I hissed. “I’m going to try to slow them down.”

  She nodded again.

  I worked my way back down the slope far enough that I could see the narrow trail that Emily and I had climbed. The landslide danger was obvious. The soil was loose and broken, with chunks of black basalt embedded in the crumbling dirt. I picked up a rock about the size of an apple and carried it to a better vantage point of the hairpin turn in the trail. I was about seventy-five yards away from the hairpin, too far away for me to be accurate with the short-barreled pistol I carried, but all I had to do was to get them to turn around and head back down the trail. Rocks seemed like a good choice for a weapon.

  Peck’s bad boys had moved up the trail quickly. I heard swearing, first quietly and then louder as number one rounded the hairpin turn and began to appreciate the narrowness of the path and the depth of the chasm off to the right. He was wearing a grey windbreaker with white fabric at the neckline, bleached blue jeans with a cut in the fabric across one knee, and brown leather loafers with white rubber soles. He looked like he’d planned for a day on a yacht.

  Number two put a tentative leg around the corner and then began the delicate process of shifting his hips around the sharp edge of the hairpin turn. He wore a blue cotton jacket with the collar turned up, tan slacks, and black loafers. Not really beach attire, but maybe they hadn’t been given much notice before Peck told them to come down to the beach to chase after us.

  I threw the rock at the one in front. I actually aimed the rock at a place about ten feet ahead of him, head-high, with the plan that the rock would bounce off the wall, scatter debris in his face, and then hit him. That was my intent, anyway. The motion of my throw must have caught his peripheral vision, because I saw him turn his face in my direction. Then he jerked his arms up to protect his head and pressed his body against the wall. The rock that I’d thrown hit the wall a few feet over his head, spraying him with dirt before it fell soundlessly into the chasm. He shook off the dirt and gravel, pulled a pistol out of a holster at the base of his back, pointed it in my direction, and pulled the trigger. The bowl-shaped cliffside amplified the sound of the gunfire to gut-punching levels.

  I bent over and then stayed low, and I began throwing rocks downhill as hard and as fast as I could. The two men on the narrow trail tried to reduce their sizes as targets by squatting down, and then they opened fire in my direction, clicking off one round every few seconds, conserving their ammo in a very disciplined way, not panicking, but I kept throwing anyway, squatting down between throws, and after six or seven throws I finally hit one of them with a rock. There was a cry of acute pain followed by a scream that gathered volume before becoming shrill and then stopping suddenly. I stood straight up so that I could see what had happened, and it was apparent that the second man, the one in the boarding school attire, had fallen into the chasm. The one who’d been in front was on his hands and knees, peering down into the void after his fallen comrade. A third man, much bigger than the first two but with such a large belly that it was impossible for him to go around the hairpin turn, leaned his head around the corner every few seconds to see what was happening. He had a pistol in his right hand, aimed the gun up the hill in my direction, and squinted along the gunsights at me. As I did not want my head blown off by a lucky shot, I squatted on my haunches once more and considered whether to shoot at the one remaining on the trail, throw more rocks, or just rejoin Emily in the trees and then make a run for my house.

  I heard a soft grunting sound followed by a whistling noise. I lifted my head in time to see part of the cliffside near the hairpin turn explode as a rock smashed against it. The fat man edged out of sight. I looked over my shoulder and saw Emily pick up a fist-sized rock and throw it with the kind of precise body mechanics that come from years of practice. I watched the trajectory of the rock as it bounced once off the trail and then struck the shin of the man wearing the grey windbreaker. He cried out, brought his pistol around, and fired wildly in my direction. Emily threw a second rock that caught him in the cheek, and he stepped back with a jerking motion as if he’d touched an electric plate. He let go of his gun and then his hand came up towards his face. Emily threw a third rock that caught him squarely in the face, snapping his head back before his body did a swooning pirouette to the right. His attempt to regain his balance was both heartbreaking and sickening to watch as he tottered, fell to his knees, and clawed at the edge of the cliff on his way into the chasm.

  The fat man peered around the corner, saw that both of his companions were gone, and he began firing one round after another at Emily and me. I think that he’d decided to empty his pistol at us because there was nothing else he could do. Emily turned her back to me, picked her pistol up off the ground, and ran for the trees again. I followed close behind, ignoring the sound of gunfire as I chased her up the hill.

  We stopped running once we were back in the shade of the Douglas Firs. Emily’s chest heaved as she gulped for air. She held the silver pistol in the two-handed shooting stance, forming a triangle between her torso, her arms, and the gun.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded without saying anything.

  “We’re going to have to go up top to get to the highway. We can run back to the house from there. Okay?”

  She didn’t say anything. I walked over to where she stood.

  “Emily,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. Eyes straight ahead, gun still out and ready to fire.

  “We’re going now, okay?” I said. “Right now. Can you walk?”

  She nodded stiffly. I could see that the barrel of the pistol was shaking.

  “We’ll go up the hill together,” I said. I cupped her elbow gently with my hand and pulled slightly. The two of us moved uphill, trying to keep our footing on the layer of pine needles that topped the crumbling soil. When we had climbed high enough that the crest of the hill was visible, I told Emily to hold off, and she waited behind while I continued up the hill on my own. I peered around a tree to check the road, and there was no carload of thugs, no anonymous sedan, no threat of any kind. Highway 131 looked ordinary, inviting, and safe.

  “Emily!” I shouted. “Come on up! It’s okay.”

  Emily worked her way up the hill to join me, still holding her gun at the ready. I put my pistol back in its pancake holster and felt the pressure of the holster against my sweaty skin. The hooded sweatshirt which had been a good choice for a walk on the beach had turned into a sweaty hothouse during the battle on the cliff. I considered taking the sweatshirt off, but my gun would have been clearly visible, so I pulled the sleeves up to my elbow to allow my arms to cool off.

  “You should put the gun away,” I said. “It’s okay. There’s nobody here.”

  Emily looked uncertain about where to put her pistol. She’d dropped Sandy’s purse when she’d taken the gun out, and it didn’t make sense to go back and look for it. Her pants were too tight to put the gun in her pocket, so I held out my hand and asked her to give it to me. She reluctantly agreed, and I took the gun from her sweaty hand. I clicked the pistol’s safety on and slid it into my back pocket.

  My jeans were dirty but my clothes were otherwise intact. Emily was barefoot and her sweater was torn. She looked like she’d been the victim of an assault, and I suppose that she was. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she was still in shock.

  “Emily,” I said. “Your sweater is ripped. Take it off. Let’s just leave it here so we’re not so conspicuous, okay?”

  Her hands
were filthy from what we’d done on the cliffside, and she seemed reluctant to touch Sandy’s clothes with her fingers. She stood passively while I took hold of the waistline of the cashmere sweater and then pulled it gently up to her bust line, and then I stretched it out and upward. She raised her arms over her head while I lifted the sweater free of her arms. Once I had the sweater off, I balled it up and threw it into the undergrowth.

  The white dress shirt that she’d worn under the sweater still looked good enough for a walk on a country road on a nice sunny day. It was stained with sweat but otherwise clean.

  “I killed that man, didn’t I?” Emily said.

  “You hit one of them with a rock,” I said. “He was shooting at us, remember?”

  She shrugged slightly. I could see tears welling in her eyes.

  “We’re walking back to my house, okay?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, and we started walking. If I’d been by myself, I would have been running like hell, but Emily seemed so fogged by what had happened that running was out of the question. We would probably have looked like bank robbers if we’d been running down the highway, anyway. Instead, I held her hand and we walked on the grassy shoulder of the road all the way back to Oceanside. Half a dozen cars went by during our walk, and each time that happened Emily grabbed hold of my arm in fear. I tried to be casual about it, but I was on edge, too. Peck had declared war.

  By the time we’d gotten back to Oceanside, half an hour had passed. Emily hadn’t said a single word. I thought about how four of the six men who’d come after us on the beach were still alive and no doubt motivated to get even for what happened. I assumed that my next encounter with Peck’s people would come in the form of a bullet fired across a parking lot, or from a knife in the back as I waited in line at a hardware store, or possibly from my house burning down around me in the middle of the night. I started thinking about ways to take the battle to Peck.

  There were several dozen cars in the parking lot for Oceanside Beach. None looked suspicious or out of place. There were no black panel vans with the windows painted out, and no thugs loitering about with machine guns. Everything looked ordinary in a way that should have been reassuring but instead felt jarring after what we’d been through on the cliff. We walked past the parking lot and continued on up the hill to the house. There were no visible signs of break-in at my front door. I drew my pistol and used my key to let us into the house, and we went inside. I locked the deadbolt on the front door and led Emily over to a chair at the kitchen table. I laid both of our pistols on the countertop and pulled off my sweatshirt.

  “Emily,” I asked. “Do you want a drink?”

  She looked down at her feet and didn’t respond. Her legs were filthy from the knees down, as were her hands. She looked like someone who’d been living in the wilderness for a while.

  I got a bottle of cabernet out of the cabinet and poured several inches of wine into a glass. I held the glass out in front of her, and she took it from me without making eye contact. She tipped the glass back and drained it like someone chugging lemonade on a hot summer day.

  “Do you want more?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m not sorry I did what I did. I’m okay.” She was still looking at her feet.

  “If we didn’t stop those two men on the trail, they would have caught us on that slope, or on the highway.”

  “Why were they chasing us?” she said.

  “Remember the story I told you about the loan shark?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think that they’re part of his crew.”

  “How did they know where you were?”

  “I haven’t made it a secret that I live here,” I said. “My guess is that Peck’s people were watching the house and saw us going down to the beach. They called for reinforcements who started at opposite ends of the beach we were walking on, and they caught us in the middle.”

  “Won’t they come back?”

  “They can’t leave those men in that ravine,” I said. “Once they find a way to get them out of there, they’ll probably try again.”

  I poured three inches of wine in another glass and leaned against the kitchen countertop while I drained the glass. I relished the quiet of the house, the wood floors, the blue walls, the hurricane lamps. Everything was tidy and in its place, but I knew that wouldn’t last.

  Someone’s car alarm went off in the beach parking lot and then quieted.

  I walked over to where Emily sat.

  “Come wash your hands,” I said. “You’ll feel better.” I took her hands and pulled her gently upright, then walked her over to the sink. I turned the faucet on and began washing my hands but she just stood there, so I took her hands gently in mine and held them under the faucet. She stood perfectly still as I used a soapy washcloth to rub off the grass stains and dirt stains from her forearms and fingers. After a while I rubbed her palms with bar soap. We were pressed hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder at the sink, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a single tear roll down her cheek. I shut off the faucet, then took the towel from the countertop and wiped her hands dry. She had her lips pressed together like she was deep in thought, and she stared at the floor as if she were afraid to look at me.

  I held out my hand to her as if I were asking her to dance.

  “Let’s get your feet,” I said. “Come on.”

  She put her hand in mine.

  We went through the living room to the bathroom, and she sat on the commode while I ran the water. I held my hand under the faucet until the water warmed.

  “Okay,” I said. “Water’s ready.”

  Emily stood from the commode and then sat on the edge of the tub with her feet under the faucet. She rubbed bar soap against the skin on her feet and shins, and after a while she asked if I had any nail polish remover to use on the soles of her feet. The skin had been made black by road tar.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s okay. It can wait.”

  She shut the water off and I handed her a dry towel. I stood in the doorway briefly while she dried her feet, and then I went into the living room and stood by the big picture window. The parking lot at the base of the hill looked the way that it usually did. Three Arch Rocks, the beach, the surf, the roofs of my neighbors’ houses appeared unchanged. Everything looked familiar and timeless from that window, but I knew that I’d crossed a line and couldn’t go back.

  I heard Emily’s bare feet brushing against the oak floor, and then she was beside me. She put her hand on my shoulder and said “Thank you” so quietly that I barely heard it.

  I turned to face her.

  When I did that, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me once on the cheek, then patted me absently on my chest several times before leaving her palm resting against my skin. We stood like that for a while, neither of us moving or wanting to move. Then she leaned in and put her body against mine as if music for a slow dance had started to play. Her forehead was against the hollow of my neck, and I could feel her breath on my skin.

  I put my hand lightly against the small of her back and felt the softness of her through the linen shirt. She rested one of her palms on my waist so carefully that I barely felt its weight at all. I took her other hand in mine, and we began to move as if music were playing. I applied gentle pressure with my palm, pulled softly with my other hand, and we rotated slowly around the living room floor. We moved to our own music, finding solace in each other’s company, touch, and rhythm. I felt her relax in my arms, and I held her closer and tighter.

  In spite of the likelihood that Peck’s thugs would arrive at my house soon, the sensation of Emily’s touch overwhelmed my common sense. I thought that I’d put on a certain amount of armor during our battle with Peck’s bad boys on the cliffside, that I’d found a way to get past the effect that she had on me, but I experienced something like an electric shock running through me when her body was pressed agai
nst mine. She tipped her head forward, and I felt the warmth of her breath against my neck again, the silky softness of her honey-blonde hair against my cheek. We stopped moving as if the music had ended. Then she slid her hands higher on my back. I put one of my hands against the base of her neck and she tilted her head back slightly. Our eyes met for a moment, the blue of her eyes so pure in that sunny room, our lips touching with infinite gentleness before she pressed her mouth against mine.