Caught in the Middle

by Gayle Roper

I nodded. “He’s too tall. He’ll get permanent curvature of the spine. And thanks. I’d be happy to spend the night at your place.”

  We started working our way slowly around the exhibit, and I was happy for the distraction from my problems. I was also amazed and very impressed at Curt’s work.

  “I always thought of watercolors as misty and impressionistic,” I said.

  “Me, too,” agreed Maddie.

  There was nothing “soft” about Curt’s painting. I looked at the old Chester County stone farmhouse with each of its brown fieldstones cleanly delineated. Beside the house stood snow-laden evergreens dipping beneath their burden. It was precise, a work of drafting as much as a work of art. But it was primarily a play of light and shadows, the white of the paper opposite the greens, grays, blues and violets of subtle shadings.

  And it was Chester County. I hadn’t lived in this part of Pennsylvania for very long, but driving down Route 82 or through Marshallton or out toward Glenmoore, I had seen just this type of house many times.

  “I’ve seen one or two of Curt’s pictures before,” I said, looking at an uncharacteristically whimsical study of two geese squawking angrily at each other beside a stream. I could feel the tension Curt wanted me to feel between the serenity of the stream and rolling pastureland and the pique of the birds’ stretched necks and angry stances. “But seeing so many at once makes me realize his talent.”

  We stopped in front of a large painting of a stone barn with a weathered red door. There was a $3000 price listed on the placard beside the painting.

  “What’s that little red dot on the placard mean?” I asked Maddie.

  “Sold.”

  I glanced around to reconfirm what I already knew. “Then almost all of these are already sold.”

  Maddie nodded.

  “But the doors only opened a little over an hour ago.”

  “Wonderful, isn’t it?” she said.

  I looked casually around the room until I found Curt in the center of a group. Everyone was listening attentively to every word he said. He gestured to a picture of a springhouse and said something that made everybody laugh. He nodded at them and turned away, only to be surrounded by another admiring throng.

  One word popped to my mind: lionized.

  “Do people always respond to him like that?” I asked Maddie. Suddenly, as if he felt my eyes on him, he looked directly at me, and as our eyes met, he smiled. At that moment I had almost as much trouble breathing as I had when Andy had me by the throat.

  “Most of the time people don’t realize who he is, but at an exhibit he’s the star,” Maddie said. I heard her dimly through the ringing in my ears.

  Curt started to make his way toward me—us—and it was like watching the Red Sea part for him, then close in again behind him. All along his line of progress, people shook his hand and patted his back.

  “You made it,” he said when he reached us.

  I nodded and blurted, “I need to interview you for tomorrow’s edition.” Maybe if I were all business, he wouldn’t know how he affected me until I could figure it out myself.

  “All you need to say about me is that I’m pleased with the turnout and the response to my work. I’ll introduce you to a couple of people who can give you better quotes.”

  “Like me,” said Maddie. She cleared her throat and pronounced, “I know what I like, and I like a Curtis Carlyle hanging above my mantel—provided, of course, that it doesn’t clash with my living room colors.”

  Curt grimaced. “That last crack is too true.”

  The evening passed pleasantly and ended earlier than it might have because of the weather, but Curt didn’t mind. He had been a success any way you chose to define the term, and he knew it.

  It was as the flautist and piano player waved goodbye to Curt that it hit me that I didn’t have a way home. My car keys were somewhere unknown, probably buried under the snow in The News’s parking lot.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Maddie as she struggled with her coat, which Doug was holding for her.

  “Can you guys give me a ride home?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Maddie said as she spun around and glared up at her husband. “Doug, remember I’m not six-six like you! Lower my sleeves to real-people height, please!”

  Doug obediently dropped the coat below his waist.

  “I’ve got a better plan,” said Curt as he came up to us. “I’ll take Merry home and get her overnight things. Then I’ll bring her to your house, and she can spend the night with you guys. It’s not safe for her to be alone.”

  “We’re way ahead of you, guy,” said Maddie, her arms finally planted in her sleeves. “We’re already expecting her.”

  “We are?” said Doug.

  “We are,” said Maddie.

  Doug smiled at me. “I just painted the guest room last week. You’re the first to use it.”

  “Whiskers will be mad,” I said. “He hates it when I go out at night.”

  “So we’ll talk to him a lot before we leave,” Curt said. “Or better yet, we’ll stop and get some food, cook dinner and eat with him. Then we’ll go to Maddie and Doug’s.”

  I looked at Maddie and she nodded, obviously pleased with the idea of my having dinner with Curt in such a domestic setting. Subtle she wasn’t.

  On our way home, Curt and I stopped at the Acme Market, where he insisted on pushing the shopping cart.

  “I’m just trying to help,” he said as we walked through the produce section, me trailing beside him like a useless appendage. “You’ve had a wild evening.”

  Like pushing the cart will tax my strength and nerves to the limit, I thought ungratefully, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell him that the real reason I wanted to push was so I’d have something to hang on to. Somewhere between City Hall and the Acme, my legs had gone spaghetti on me again, but if Curt knew, he’d probably try to put me in the cart’s kid seat.

  For some reason I thought of Jolene and her comment about Arnie cherishing her. While I didn’t think Curt was at the cherishing stage, he was definitely at the caring-for-me stage, and it made me prickly and hostile and nervous.

  Why? Why did a nice thing like being cared for make me an emotional basket case?

  Because being cared for wasn’t something I was used to, at least not by any man except my father? Because a kind if slightly bossy man might cause me to think he was the solution to my loneliness, my uncertainty, my pressing on? Because I might believe he could fix my life for me?

  But if I fell for someone just so he could alleviate my pain, I’d be like Jolene, afraid to be alone, terrified of the loneliness. I’d be weak again, or still not strong.

  And I would not be weak again! I would not! I would be strong!

  “How about getting one of those Caesar salad kits?” Curt suggested. “They’re fast and tasty, my two criteria for food I have to prepare. And get your hand off the cart. I’m driving.”

  “I’ll put my hand on the cart if I want to,” I snapped. “And yes, a Caesar salad sounds good to me, too.”

  He reached across me and grabbed a bag of romaine, effectively trapping me between the cart and the produce, his arm almost resting on my shoulders. Grinning down at me, he winked, then innocently dropped the lettuce into the cart. He moved on whistling “Merrily We Roll Along” under his breath. Next thing I knew, he’d be telling me it was our song or some such nonsense.

  I made a show of studying the tomatoes, waiting for my heart rate and my flushed face to return to normal. I suddenly realized I’d better stop stroking the tomato so intensely, or I’d have to buy it in spite of the fact that it was the equivalent of red wood pulp. I put it down and went after Curt.

  I found him in the spaghetti aisle, looking at various bottled sauces. We dickered for a while over which we could both enjoy.

  “But I don’t like mushrooms,” I said.

  “How can you have spaghetti sauce without mushrooms?” he said.

  “Very easily,” I said. “I
’ve been doing it all my life, and I don’t want to change tonight.”

  “And I’m supposed to be chivalrous and give in?”

  I nodded. “I’ve had a wild evening, remember?”

  “But you can hardly taste them in the sauce. You’ll never even notice them.”

  “Then we don’t need them,” I said, grabbing a jar with no mushrooms.

  “Then I get to pick the pasta,” he said. “Linguini.”

  “It’s too thick! Angel hair.”

  “Too thin!”

  We ended up with thin spaghetti, which I secretly suspected was what we both usually ate, anyway.

  We drove home in silence. No radio, no tape, no CD, no talking. Silence. Inside the car I couldn’t even hear the silky sound of falling snow. It was wonderful. I put my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes.

  I thought about Jack, who was a noise man. Always music or talk or TV. He told me he even went to sleep with the radio on, not tuned to a quiet, soothing, sleepy kind of station, but to a rock station with an obnoxious DJ.

  “I don’t want to wake up and find it quiet,” he said. “I hate quiet.” And when he smiled that gorgeous smile, he sounded perfectly reasonable to me. I felt appalled to realize that I had been willing to give up silence for the rest of my life just because Jack’s smile made me lose what little common sense I had.

  Suddenly I had to sneeze, which I always do in clusters. I felt almost guilty as my five bursts of noise shattered the tranquillity of the car.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled as I held my throat. Those sneezes hurt!

  Curt glanced quickly at me and grinned. “You’re forgiven.”

  And silence descended again.

  We pulled into the parking lot beside my house, and I noticed Mr. Jacobs, the landlord, had upped the wattage of the light by the walk a bit. Not that it made much difference tonight. The snowfall effectively undid any good the brighter light might have done.

  I climbed out of Curt’s car and stepped into snow that slipped up under my slacks and bit my skin above my boots. Mr. Jacobs apparently had his own timetable for shoveling his tenants’ parking area, and it had nothing to do with need.

  Curt bent into the backseat to collect the groceries, but I plowed through the snow, head down, and learned that Mr. Jacobs felt the same way about sidewalks as parking areas. I sighed. If he were as prompt with shoveling as he was with needed repairs like my dripping kitchen faucet, he was probably planning to wait for a spring thaw to deal with the snow. A thaw was bound to come in a couple of months. Or three or four. I sighed. I’d better go buy a shovel tomorrow.

  The lilac tree looked like a giant snowball tonight, and for some reason it was less threatening draped in its white mantle.

  When the man stepped out from behind it, I didn’t even scream.

  “Don’t scream,” he said, needlessly, I thought, since I wasn’t making a sound. “I won’t hurt you.”

  I nodded, finding it amazing that the one time the lilac didn’t make me nervous, it was doing exactly what I had feared all the other times.

  “I read what you wrote about me,” he said.

  “What I wrote about you?” I stared at the man. He was young, about my age, and big. Like a football player. Tall. Like a basketball player. He had a handsome face with a strong jaw, and he wore an Amhearst cap. His hands were stuffed in his parka pockets, and a scarf was wrapped about his neck. He was skittish, nervous, and spoke in rushed, short sentences.

  “Yeah. What you wrote about me.”

  I’d only written about one young man recently. That was Patrick. But Mac had written about another guy and his alleged actions. I felt my blood congeal. “You’re—” I couldn’t make myself say it.

  He nodded. “Andy Gershowitz.”

  Now I screamed.

  THIRTEEN

  “Don’t scream!” Andy begged, looking fearfully over his shoulder. “Please! I won’t hurt you! I just want to tell you I didn’t do it!”

  “Merry!” Curt came thundering from the parking lot, tossing the grocery bag aside as he ran.

  Andy took one look at Curt racing toward us, groaned and took off.

  Curt grabbed me by the arms and peered into my face. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  I held on, the second time in one night I’d used Curt as my prop against collapse. I wasn’t screaming anymore, but I was making little hiccuppy noises that I didn’t like. I forced myself to take a deep breath, then another.

  “I’m fine,” I gasped. “He never touched me.”

  We turned in unison and stared down the alley just in time to make out a figure as it ran under the streetlight at the corner.

  “There he goes!” I said in one of those needless, obvious comments I’m given to at times.

  “Stay here!” Curt ordered, and raced away, veering left onto Oak Lane after Andy.

  “Please, dear God!” I yelled an arrow prayer shot straight from my heart to God’s. I couldn’t even articulate all the possibilities that crowded my mind, horrors like Andy shooting Curt or a car running them both down because they were too hard to see in the storm.

  “Curt! Come back!” I raced after him onto Oak Lane. I peered through the falling snow. Was that someone dashing across the street down in the next block? Andy? Curt?

  I ran wobbling on my pencil-slim stilettos, sloshing through the snow like I knew what I was doing and where I was going. After I’d run three blocks, I had enough snow in my ankle boots to build a snowman, I had a stitch in my side that felt jagged enough to pierce the frail covering of skin and spill my innards right there in the snow, and my breath made a steam-locomotive sound like a lullaby. And, most upsetting, I had no idea whatsoever what had happened to either Curt or Andy. They’d simply disappeared, their tracks mingled with those of people out walking their dogs or coming from the bus stop two blocks away or simply out enjoying the first snow of the season.

  I turned and trudged back the way I’d come, zinging arrow prayers heavenward the whole time. Inside, I felt a weird hollowness that I guessed was fear, both for me and Curt and also for Andy Gershowitz.

  As many times as I’d thought about Andy over the past few hours, he’d been an abstraction. He had shot at me, a very concrete activity. He had tried to strangle me, another quite concrete action. But I’d seen him neither time. I hadn’t heard his voice, looked into his face, felt his fear. Now I had. Now he was a person. Now he was real. And I wasn’t quite sure what that meant for me emotionally.

  I was so intent on my thoughts that I never knew anyone was near me until a hand touched my shoulder.

  I jerked wildly, the weird hollowness inside exploding into panic. As I jumped, I hit a patch of ice with one high-heeled boot and went down flat on my back. I wanted to leap to my feet and assume a don’t-mess-with-me stance, but I didn’t have the energy, either physically or emotionally. Besides, I’d never had don’t-mess-with-me lessons. Nice girls from nice Christian families rarely do. Instead I threw my arms up to protect myself from the very man I’d just been feeling somewhat sorry for.

  My hands were pulled down, and a large man with glasses and lots of snow in his dark, curly hair was on his knees beside me.

  “Are you all right?” Curt asked, clearly distressed at my fall.

  I glared, torn between relief and anger that it was him. “You should have called my name,” I said as I let him pull me to my feet. “You should have warned me you were there.”

  “I did call,” he said. “Several times. But you were off in some thought world all your own.”

  “Um,” I said. I wasn’t about to tell him that part of the reason I didn’t hear him was because I was praying for him. He was liable to think the common courtesy of a prayer meant more than it did. “I was thinking about Andy. What happened? Where is he?”

  Curt shrugged. “I lost him. I think he ran between some houses over near Trudy McGilpin’s place. But in this weather I can’t be certain.”

  I nodded. “I’m sort
of glad you didn’t catch him. I mean, what would you have done if you had? And what would he have done?”

  Curt laughed. “Good questions, and I haven’t the vaguest idea what either answer would have been. I just chased him instinctively.” He took my arm as we started walking home. “I guess we’d better call Sergeant Poole.”

  “Again,” I said.

  With fingers I was proud to see were barely shaking, I put the key in the door and let us into my apartment. I resisted the urge to turn on all the lights in the place, satisfying myself by making the living room as bright as I could get it.

  A blinking Whiskers emerged from the bedroom to see what was going on. I grabbed the animal and hugged him so closely that he began to protest. Burying my face in his neck, I marveled at the comforting sensation of warm animal and soft fur.

  Curt hung up his coat and turned to me. He pried the cat from my arms, pulled my coat off and led me to an armchair. Then he pushed me gently down and put Whiskers in my lap.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, my heart pounding at the thought of being alone.

  “I’m going to get the groceries,” he said mildly. “I just hope I didn’t break the spaghetti sauce when I dropped the bag.”

  Whiskers and I stood in the doorway and watched as he pulled the wet paper bag from the bushes by the walk. The bag disintegrated under his touch, and the groceries tumbled every which way. He dived unerringly at the bottle of sauce and caught it just before it smashed on the sidewalk.

  “Spectacular save,” I said when he came to the door, bottle in hand. “Even Whiskers was impressed.”

  When Curt returned with the rest of the groceries, I was on the phone with 911. As I talked, Whiskers stalked me, butting me in the shins in a determined campaign for food.

  “Does he do that often?” Curt asked.

  I nodded as I listened to the police dispatcher saying he would get my message to Sergeant Poole as quickly as he could.

  “Where’s his food?” Curt asked.

  “Top shelf in the last cabinet,” I said as I hung up. “I used to keep it in a bottom cabinet, but he learned how to wrap his paw under the base of the door and pull it open. Then he’d chew through the cat-food bag. It had so many holes that it bled pellets every time I picked it up. Finally I got smart and moved it.”