This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Sit here,” Joy said.

  Thankful for the insulating pad in the coverall, Gabe put his butt on damp, cold stone.

  “Sitting,” he said wryly.

  She made a sound that could have been a giggle.

  It surprised both of them.

  She shrugged out of her equipment sling and tied it to her ankle. Then she positioned the sack holding her rope so that she could push it along in front of her.

  “Give me your backpack,” she said.

  “Giving you my backpack,” he said as though he was still being belayed.

  She laughed out loud.

  He stripped off his backpack and watched her tie it just behind her own rucksack. “You’re really going to take my stuff, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “I really am. You’ll thank me on the other side. Davy swears that Gotcha is only six inches across at one point.”

  “Can he get his helmet through?”

  “You mean the old caving axiom?”

  “Yeah. If you can take off your helmet and push it through a passage, your body can follow.”

  “Oh, it’s true most of the time. But not always. Especially for someone with as much bone and muscle as Davy.”

  “Or hips like Maggie’s?”

  “Her hips wiggle through just fine.”

  Joy pulled the wire leads to her helmet lamp. It meant she was in the dark, but that was better than having the wires getting hung up on rocks as she wriggled through the passage.

  Without being asked, Gabe directed his helmet lamp toward the discouragingly small opening to the crawlway that Joy had named Gotcha. He watched while she flattened onto her stomach and eeled into the passage, pushing the rope bag ahead of her and dragging two compact sacks of equipment behind.

  Very quickly his helmet light stopped being much use for Joy. Her body almost filled the tunnel, leaving room for little more than random flashes of illumination from behind as she moved deeper into the passage. The sounds of cloth rubbing over stone, boots scrabbling against mud to find the rock beneath, and Joy’s soft grunts of effort faded, leaving Gabe alone in Lost River Cave’s immense silence.

  As soon as Joy jackknifed through the first of Gotcha’s seven major twists, the darkness within the passage was complete. The lack of light didn’t bother her. She’d done Gotcha so many times that she usually did it by touch alone. It was impossible to get lost when there were only two ways to go—forward or backward.

  After the fourth twist in the tube Joy rested for a moment. Despite the fact that Gotcha had been formed by water seeping through joints and seams in the limestone reef, and then widened by becoming the tunnel for an underground stream, the walls weren’t smooth. The thin layer of cave mud was deeper in some places than in others. The ceiling dropped in some areas and went up in others, and the walls pinched in or flared out according to weaknesses in the ancient reef.

  On top of that, moving water always had currents that wore away stone unevenly. The scalloped pattern that remained in Gotcha’s passage snagged clothes, helmets, equipment bags, and boots. The scallops also gave good leverage for elbows, hips, knees, and feet. In all, getting through Gotcha was a workout that left even experienced cavers sweating and a little breathless.

  Voices gradually drowned out the sound of Joy’s breathing. Voices whispering, voices murmuring, voices in liquid songs teasing her mind. By the sixth twist in the difficult tube, she was wrapped in haunting sounds.

  The first time she’d pushed through the unknown crawlway, the voices had frightened her. Gabe had been gone sixteen days, her parents had been dead less than a week, and she’d heard her mother and her father and her lover whispering to her, calling her name softly, tearing her soul with claws of grief and memory.

  By the time she’d emerged into the Voices’ immense room, she was crying too hard to see anything within reach of her light.

  Today Joy wriggled out of Gotcha with dry eyes. Fine silt and memories clung to her. She stood quickly, searching for lights weaving among the unearthly voices. She saw only darkness. Automatically she connected the wire leads to her helmet lamp.

  Light speared out, revealing the cave’s muted shades of cream and rust, oyster and tan and charcoal. She walked first to the left, then to the right in a thirty-foot zigzag that led around a drapery of solid stone and into the room itself.

  From her new perspective she saw a faint glow of light somewhat to the right and below her. There were no other light sources that she could see. Either Davy, Fish, and Maggie had stayed close together and their lights showed as a single source of illumination, or someone was hidden among one of the hundreds of deep alcoves, solution cavities, sponge-like mazes and overhangs that lined the room.

  She pulled out her two-way radio.

  “Fish?”

  “Yo.”

  “Where?”

  “Opposite end from Gotcha. Davy and Maggie are with me.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “If okay means writing notes, holding string, writing notes, measuring string, cussing at dainty sonar and laser gizmos that don’t work worth spit after Gotcha—yeah, things are okay.”

  “Sounds normal. I’m going back through Gotcha for Gabe. If I need you, I’ll holler.”

  The little radio made a popping sound as Fish punched the send button once, which was shorthand for Understood and out.

  The room Joy called the Voices was four hundred and six feet long, three hundred and fifty-three feet wide at its widest point, and so haphazardly shaped that at first the cavers had thought it was three rooms rather than one. Until you learned a few landmarks it was easy to get lost in the black velvet sweep and intricate stone formations of the Voices.

  Joy peeled off equipment, stacked it neatly to one side, and got back down on her hands and knees. Then she stopped, remembering the impact the Voices had on her the first time she’d heard them seven years ago. She didn’t know the names of the ghosts who would claw at Gabe’s soul, but she knew that he had them.

  She had seen them in his eyes.

  That was new. The Gabe of her memories had no shadowy hauntings, no dark regrets, nothing but the bright future calling to him.

  Joy reached for her rucksack, untied the top, and plunged her hand in. After a little groping her fingers closed over one of her emergency light tubes. She brought it out and twisted it sharply. Pale green light glowed magically from her hands.

  She propped the light tube against a stalagmite that was growing a few feet beyond Gotcha’s beginning—or end, depending on which way you were going. The light would be a beacon for Gabe, a piece of reality to hold on to while the Voices sliced through his soul.

  She unplugged her battery leads again and went back into the twisting passage. When she emerged there was only darkness. Hurriedly she plugged in her helmet lamp.

  “Gabe?” she called, her voice frayed.

  “Here.”

  The voice came from her right. Reflexively she snapped her head around, bathing his face in light. He winced and closed his eyes.

  “Sorry.” She tilted her light away from his eyes. “You startled me. I didn’t expect to find you sitting alone in the dark.”

  “Just getting reacquainted with the absolute lack of light,” he said. “Better here than when I’m wedged in Gotcha.”

  “Are you . . .”—she hesitated—“all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said softly. “I find the blackness very peaceful. It makes all my other senses come alive.”

  She couldn’t see him smile but she heard it in his voice.

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  Her own voice was subtly vibrant. She was remembering a time seven years ago when she’d turned out both their helmet lamps in order to let him experience the seamless, flawless dark. He’d kissed her then, deep within Lost River Cave’s eternal night, and she’d been all but overwhelmed by sensations that had nothing to do with sight. It was the first time she had truly felt the strength in his lean body
, the heat, the hunger.

  The memory went through Joy like the Voices, calling to her in ways she could neither fight nor understand.

  “Give me your rope.” Her voice was husky.

  Silently he handed over the canvas sack with his rope in it.

  “At about the fourth twist of Gotcha,” she said quickly, tying the bag to her ankle, “you’ll hear voices. You aren’t going crazy. It’s just flowing water and the chamber’s eerie acoustics coming to you through the crawlway. Hold that thought and keep pushing forward.”

  There was a quality to Joy’s voice that made Gabe wish his helmet light was plugged in so that he could see her face. She sounded as concerned for him as she’d been when he’d fallen on belay. It made him wonder if she somehow sensed the caustic interior dialogue in his mind as he tried to understand, or at least accept, insights about himself and the past.

  “Spooky, huh?” he asked curiously.

  “Very. When I forced the tube the first time, I thought I’d finally gone nuts.”

  “When was that?”

  “Six days after my parents died.” Her tone didn’t invite comment or comfort.

  He said nothing more.

  Using the illumination from Joy’s helmet lamp, he lined himself up just outside Gotcha’s small mouth.

  “Like most waterways formed below the water table,” she said, “Gotcha is essentially circular. People aren’t. If the going gets too tight, take off your helmet and push it ahead of you. If that doesn’t change your profile enough, back up until you can pull one arm down along your side and lead with the other arm. That will give you a more circular profile.”

  “If Davy can make it, I should shoot through Gotcha like grass through a goose.”

  “Don’t bet on it. He has more meat, but you have more width in the shoulders. It’s the shoulder bones that get stuck on a man.”

  “And on a woman?”

  “Pelvic girdle,” she said succinctly.

  “Poor Maggie.”

  The thought of Gabe noticing Maggie’s firm, lushly rounded bottom irritated Joy even as she told herself that she was being foolish. Nothing had changed Gabe’s sensual nature in the last seven years, and Maggie had a body to tempt any man.

  Bleakly Joy hoped that Maggie kept her usually level head when Gabe’s charm started to work, dissolving her barriers like superheated groundwater working on limestone.

  He’d certainly dissolved Joy fast enough.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” she said in a clipped voice. “Don’t try to stay on your stomach all the time. Use your sides, your back, whatever gets it done. Make your body give in to the passage, because it sure as hell won’t give in for you. Stone is stronger than any man. Don’t fight it. Flex with it. If you get stuck, either holler or thump your foot three times. When you feel me grab your ankle, relax and breathe out. You’ll be unstuck in no time at all. Okay?”

  “Gotcha.”

  She groaned at the pun.

  He gave her a triumphant smile and began slithering into Gotcha’s mouth.

  She waited until his feet were about two yards in front of her before she unplugged her helmet lamp and began to wriggle slowly after him. She paused from time to time, gauging his progress by the soft grunts and blunt curses that marked his efforts.

  Although he had to back up on the second bend and try a different angle of approach, he didn’t have any real problem with the first three twists. As near as she could tell, he ended up on his back coming out of the second turn. Davy had the same problem with that part of the tube and solved it the same way.

  Silently Gabe kept mental track of the twists and turns of Gotcha’s unforgiving passage. Somewhere on the way through the fifth turn, the aches and scrapes and complaints of his straining body dissolved in a soft rush of sound, spectral whispers washing over him, calling to him.

  He froze, heart hammering. He knew that it was his mind that was giving flesh and names to impossible ghost voices from his past.

  He knew it, yet he couldn’t believe it.

  I love you, Gabe. I love you! Don’t leave yet. Stay for another week, a day, a minute. Oh, Gabe, I love you so much! Stay with me, love me, let me love you. Please!

  He didn’t hear his answer.

  He didn’t have to.

  Woven through the ghost-Joy’s words, dissolving them, came the soft cries of a baby that had never been born.

  Fifteen

  EVEN DAYS LATER, IN THE POURING LIGHT OF LATE AFTERnoon, the memory of the first time he heard the Voices was as real to Gabe as the hot water streaming over him while he stood beneath the only working shower in Cottonwood Wells. His body had gotten used to the physical demands of cave crawling, but the uncanny cries still haunted him. He kept reliving again and again the rushing Voices and the instant six years ago when his brother’s much-forwarded message had finally reached him.

  The New Mexican cutie was satisfied with $3,744 and an abortion.

  Only now did Gabe question the white-hot anger that had consumed him while he held the letter that had waited for him for eleven months. Only now did he admit if it had been any other woman but Joy, he would have felt little but a determination never to be so careless again.

  He certainly wouldn’t have felt betrayal, contempt, and a rage that hadn’t ended until she told him that her parents had died only a few days after he left for the Orinoco.

  Whatever else did or didn’t happen years ago, he knew now that she hadn’t had the abortion casually.

  The certainty that Joy truly had been as loving as she’d been innocent unknotted something deep inside Gabe, something that he’d never even admitted was there. He didn’t know why he hadn’t questioned his rage before or why he was seeking the truth of the past now. He only knew that he was doing it.

  Each time he thought of the past, the conviction that what he’d shared with Joy wasn’t a delusion or a lie gave him a breath of peace. Like a fantastic cave decoration forming deep within the earth, he sensed something growing within himself, moment by moment, memory by memory, something of unearthly beauty emerging where only darkness and emptiness had been.

  He turned off the water and began toweling himself dry. The long, livid rope burns that had marked his leg so badly a year ago had faded to dense maroon shadows that he didn’t notice anymore. He had a few new scrapes and bruises here and there, compliments of Lost River Cave’s hard and slippery surfaces, but none of the damage was worth mentioning. Despite the three strenuous days of cave crawling he’d put in with Joy, he felt good. Very good.

  He felt more alive than he had in years.

  Seven years, to be precise.

  His heart stopped, then beat more quickly. When will she let us talk about the past?

  Don’t push, he told himself roughly. This time let her set the pace.

  He’d been very careful to give Joy as much space as possible while they were caving. They talked about Lost River Cave during the day, traded jokes with whoever else was in Cottonwood Wells over dinner, and then he went alone to his cabin to translate his notes and consolidate his impressions of the cave, the people, and himself.

  If Joy felt the same relentless need to understand more about him and her and the past, she didn’t give a single hint of it.

  Go slow.

  Don’t fuck it up again.

  Whatever “it” was.

  And that, too, was something he didn’t know. He only knew that it was as real as the fantastic cave growing beneath the violent desert sun.

  His stomach growled. Fiercely.

  He checked his waterproof, scrape-proof, shockproof watch. Quarter of five.

  Unfortunately for Gabe’s demanding stomach, it was Davy’s turn to cook dinner for the camp. That meant tacos and refried beans. Apparently Joy was the only one in Cottonwood Wells besides Gabe who knew how to bake biscuits or toss a salad, fry a chicken or barbecue a succulent rack of ribs.

  But Joy was working on some obscure estimates of the importance of phreati
c versus vadose water in Lost River Cave’s formation. Normally she would have done the work at night, after dinner, but Kati Something-or-other was coming back to camp tonight and Joy wanted to have time to spend with her.

  From what Gabe had gathered the few times Kati’s name had come up, she was a camp favorite who had taken a week’s vacation at a nearby ranch. Beyond that nothing much had been said. Among the cavers, conversation always revolved around caving in general, Lost River Cave in particular, government grants, and the latest advances in caving equipment. People were rarely mentioned, unless they were one of the early, almost legendary cave explorers.

  In fact, until the ride back to camp today, Gabe hadn’t even known that Fish had a wife, much less two kids in high school and an out-of-work live-in brother-in-law that he couldn’t stand.

  No wonder Fish spent so much time away from home.

  Gabe stretched until the ligaments in his neck and shoulders shifted and popped. He pulled on underwear, a pair of walking shorts, and sandals. There was no need for any more, and a case could be made for wearing a lot less. The New Mexican summer was an endless cauldron of dry heat. He enjoyed it, just as he enjoyed the contrasting coolness and moisture of Lost River Cave.

  He’d even come to love the Voices. He knew now that the yearning, accusing cries came from his own mind, not from ghosts whispering through darkness.

  And he wondered what voices Joy heard in the cave, what ghosts called to her, tearing apart her soul. Though she’d never mentioned it, he was certain she heard them. How else would she have known the depth of the emotional shock that would overtake him the first time through Gotcha?

  That was why she’d left a light burning at the tube’s black exit, giving him a luminous bit of reality to hold on to while the Voices broke over him in a relentless, ghostly, overwhelming wave. Once they must have broken over her, too.

  Had she heard a baby cry then?

  Does she still hear it now?

  That was one question Gabe would never ask. Just as she had known that he would be emotionally disoriented by the Voices and had left a light to help him, he knew that the abortion must have left a psychic wound on Joy that would never heal.