Until Spring

by Pamela Browning

  "Duncan knows all their names," Mary Kate said. "Every one is real special to him."

  As they watched, Jane marveled at the rapport Duncan had so obviously established with the animals. Trust; a sense of affinity; the exact feelings he had inspired in her.

  How did he manage it? She wanted to know, because she wanted to be able to do it. How easy it would be to attract the kind of friends she longed to meet in California if such a skill were hers. She'd never actually thought of establishing a connection with another human being as a skill. But it was—and she observed Duncan carefully during the next few days in order to learn it.

  She didn't want him to know that she was doing this. It would have embarrassed her to admit that she lacked such fundamental knowledge. She studied his body language, analyzed his facial expressions, did her best to commit them to memory. She realized that she was so intent on becoming an apt student that she was mimicking his movements exactly. If he sat with his legs crossed, she sat with her legs crossed. If he leaned back in his chair at the dinner table, so did she.

  If he smiled, she tried to smile, although that wasn't so easy. She didn't particularly feel like smiling.

  In the first few days of her stay at the ranch, whenever Duncan came in after a day's work, Jane would be downstairs watching television in the living room. She would always jump up and make herself as inconspicuous as possible, attempting to sidle upstairs to her room without drawing attention to herself. But after she started smiling in response to him, he seemed to want to comment whenever she left the room, and finally he spoke out.

  "Stay down here," Duncan said one night when she got up from the living-room couch to go to her room around eight o'clock. He had just come in from Rooney's house and was settling down in his leather chair in front of the fireplace.

  "I don't want to disturb you," Jane replied, but that wasn't the real reason.

  He walked over to where she stood beside the staircase and cupped his hand around her chin, turning her face toward the light. She flinched at his kindly touch, and he noticed. It worried him that human contact made her so uncomfortable.

  He didn't say what he had been going to say. Instead he said only, "The last thing you would do is disturb me." He released her face and she bowed her head.

  "What I mean is that you have a right to your privacy," she murmured in a low tone. Having learned long ago not to draw attention to herself, privacy seemed to her like the most precious of commodities, much too scarce to squander on strangers like herself.

  "Privacy!" he snorted. "I'd call it loneliness," and when she didn't move, he took her hand and tugged her back into the circle of lamplight. He sat down in a big chair, but she stood uncertainly in front of the couch until she sank onto it at last and fixed her eyes on the television screen.

  They watched the program, but even though he commented frequently on the actors or the commercials, she didn't speak. She was almost comically surprised to discover that anonymity was easier to achieve in a crowded city than in a man's living room. It was something she'd simply never thought about before.

  It seemed like a long evening to her, though not an unpleasant one. She felt out of her element and unsure how to act. Finally, when the late news flashed across the screen and she decided she could reasonably leave, she started to climb the staircase and Duncan spoke again.

  "Don't be so afraid to make yourself at home here," he said, his eyes very dark in the shadows of the dim living room.

  She paused and turned halfway around to face him. He looked so hopeful, as though it meant a lot to him for her to like it here. For some reason this made her feel wretched.

  "Thank you for everything," was all she managed to say before fleeing to her room. She had wanted to tell him that all this was new to her, that she didn't know how to make herself at home anyplace.

  In her room she walked to the window, where she pulled the drapery aside and stood looking out over the ranch. Tonight it was bathed in soft moonlight glimmering on the snow. The barn was outlined in stark detail, and she saw Duncan making his way toward it. He certainly seemed to set great store by those llamas of his.

  Maybe it was just that he liked all animals. He seemed to delight in Amos's antics, for instance. Yesterday he had unearthed an old ping-pong ball for the cat and had laughed when Amos bounded and skidded around on the kitchen floor chasing it. He had mentioned that he'd like to get another dog because his faithful companion, an Old English sheepdog, had died last year.

  In fact, Duncan's propensity for animals could be the reason that he seemed to have taken a liking to her. She was like a stray; in fact, for all intents and purposes she was a stray. A stray human. Duncan clearly saw himself as a kind of one-person humane society, feeding and sheltering her because she had nowhere else to go and because he felt sorry for her. The more she thought about this, the colder and emptier she felt. She couldn't bear pity. Clearly she needed to reassess this situation.

  She was feeling increasingly restless about her role in the household. The attention she received from these people whom she barely knew was threatening to become stifling. Their interest in her was like heat in a close room—at first it felt wonderful, but as it grew warmer and warmer, she was beginning to feel as though she couldn't breathe.

  Jane had become adept at blending in, like a chameleon taking on protective coloration so that people would think that she belonged. But everything still seemed strange to her. Duncan, Rooney and Mary Kate were kind and thoughtful of her needs. They were generous to a fault.

  And that was another part of the problem. She was having a hard time dealing with her deceit toward these fine, decent people who considered themselves her friends.

  She wouldn't have told Duncan any falsehoods if she'd thought she had any alternatives. But to tell him that he had taken a homeless street person into his home? Someone who'd found herself lying and stealing just to stay alive? At first she hadn't doubted that he'd throw her and Amos out if he knew her true colors.

  That was then. This was now.

  She was well enough to continue on her journey with or without the approval of the estimable Dr. Walker. She was ready to start a new life somewhere else under her own terms.

  She counted her assets. One old coat, one set of clothes, socks and shoes, and a cat.

  She realized that she'd need money to get all the way to California, but she'd spent all of her meager supply before the truck driver had picked her up near Elmo. For transportation, she had no doubt that she could catch a ride on the highway, but that would only get her so far. She'd have to eat. Sometimes strangers helped out with food, but she couldn't count on that.

  There was Duncan. Maybe he'd lend her the money. But no, he didn't want her to leave. He'd be furious if she suggested it, and she couldn't tell him she was planning to go immediately. She couldn't say that she had lied from the beginning and really had nowhere to go. She certainly didn't want his pity or, more to the point, didn't want to grow accustomed to it. If Duncan thought she was a pitiable creature, it wouldn't be long before she regarded herself in that light, too. Self-pity, she knew from experience, could be deadly.

  Jane was aware that Duncan often left money lying around. He liked to empty his pockets as soon as he came into the house, and he had a place where he put his wallet and loose change. It was on a table right inside the front door. There was no telling how much money he kept in his wallet, and there was usually a dollar or two in change.

  She heard the door slam downstairs, and she realized that Duncan had come in from the barn. Perhaps even now he was dumping the contents of his pockets onto the little tray on the table.

  She heard his footsteps on the stairs. As he always did, he went into his room at the other end of the hall and closed the door.

  Jane sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the lemon-yellow walls and knowing what she had to do. Sadly, with tears in her eyes, she got up and prepared her clothes for tomorrow. She would have to leave early, before it was
light. She would take only the things she had brought with her.

  Except, perhaps, for the money on the downstairs table.

  Chapter 4

  That night Duncan couldn't sleep for thinking about Jane and her problems. She was a secretive woman, a frightened woman, and he knew that there was more to her than she wanted him to know. He longed for her to open up to him. He couldn't bear the bleak expression that he so often saw in her eyes.

  There had been another woman once, his wife. He'd been too busy to pay attention to the nuances of her behavior, thinking that they would eventually pass and she'd eventually be her old self once more. He'd been wrong about that. Sigrid had found someone who could be more responsive to her moods and had moved out one night a couple of years ago.

  "It's not that I didn't love you," she had told him in parting. "It's just that I needed a man who could respond to me. And you never could."

  The sad thing about it all was that he could have, he would have, if he'd only known how important it was to her. It wasn't that he wasn't empathetic. If anything, when faced with human problems, he always cared too much. But in the macho atmosphere in which he'd grown up, it hadn't been cool to show his feelings. With Rooney and with his own father, it had embarrassed them when he tried. He learned how to cover up his caring, although he'd often managed to show people how he felt by his actions.

  Then when he got married, it seemed like a whole new ball game. With his wife, he hadn't known how important it was to show how he felt, which meant that he'd really bungled their relationship. As he'd told her before she left, it wasn't that easy to open up after a lifetime of suppressing the expression of his emotions.

  He'd had a couple of relationships since his divorce, and he'd worked on showing that he was the kind of understanding guy a woman would want. The relationships had never been too serious, but he felt equipped to deal with women now in a way that he had never been before, and he even felt grateful to Sigrid for making him learn something important about himself before it was too late.

  Sigrid was very happy now; she had married her lover, and they were living in Albuquerque. Sigrid was expecting a baby soon.

  And he, Duncan, was still alone. Since Jane had come, he hadn't felt so lonely, though. It was good to have a woman around again, even a woman who hardly spoke to him.

  He'd been surprised to find that, despite the impression of Little Girl Lost, he felt desire for her as he watched her moving around his house. She was a lovely woman. He chose not to act on his sexual attraction to her because he didn't want to add to whatever burdens she carried, and he suspected that they were considerable. He had never, for instance, bought that cock-and-bull story about her having a place to stay with a girlfriend in California.

  Tonight she'd acted so skittish. He couldn't figure her. Her moods swung from confused to grateful to disoriented to apprehensive. Most of the time she seemed to be saying, "Please, please like me." Other times, he could swear she was recoiling from his presence.

  Later that night, after Jane's light went out behind her closed bedroom door, Duncan roused himself from his solitary thoughts and went out again. He walked over to Rooney's house, something he often did late at night when he couldn't sleep. Rooney claimed to need very little sleep and usually stayed up past midnight.

  The two of them had, over the years, engaged in some productive bull sessions. The topics they covered ranged from cattle breeding to llama salesmanship, from getting along with women to rearing a ten-year-old girl. It was Duncan's belief that men could only be friends with men and women could only be friends with women. His friendship with Rooney over the years seemed to bear that out. Sigrid, his ex-wife, had certainly never been his friend.

  When Duncan walked in the door, Rooney welcomed him, offering him a cup of strong coffee, which Duncan turned down, figuring that the coffee would only keep him wider awake.

  "So how's Jane?" Rooney wanted to know when they were sitting at the scarred old kitchen table finishing off the cheesecake Rooney had bought in town today. Mary Kate loved cheesecake and so did Duncan.

  Duncan shrugged. "I don't know. Seems like she's recovering all right in a physical way, but I don't know what she's thinking. She's a strange woman, Rooney," he said.

  Rooney lifted his eyebrows. "Ain't they all?"

  "Not like her. She doesn't say much and certainly never mentions anything about herself."

  "What do you expect? She might have an unsavory past. You don't know where she came from. You ain't even sure where she's going."

  Duncan considered this and decided there was merit in it. "That makes sense, I suppose, except that she doesn't look like somebody who could do anything wrong. She's an attractive woman, Rooney. Have you ever noticed her eyes? And her hair? She reminds me of a Dresden figurine my grandmother used to have."

  Rooney shot him a keen look. "Hey, you're not starting to feel something for her, are you?"

  Duncan shifted uncomfortably in his chair before answering. "I don't know, Rooney. If anything, I'm sorry for her. She's such a sad little thing. She seldom smiles."

  "She looks like a lady with a secret to me, old boy. If I was you, I wouldn't want to get too close. Never know when you might regret it."

  "I thought maybe she'd open up when she started to feel better, maybe tell me why she's so all-fired eager to get to California. If that's where she's headed, that is. I see things about her that don't compute. I look at that ragged coat she was wearing when I found her and I wonder, 'How the dickens did she end up with a man's beat-up old topcoat to wear?' I've nearly worn myself out trying to figure her."

  Rooney got up to pour more coffee into his cup. Before he sat down again, he clapped Duncan on the shoulder.

  "You always did like a mystery, son. You'd better stick to the book variety, if you ask me. That reminds me. I picked up a few more mystery books at the library when I was in town. You want to take one home with you? Might get your mind off that little gal over there."

  Duncan sighed, wishing that he hadn't confided in Rooney after all. "Yeah, Rooney, show me what you've got. I wouldn't mind reading for a while before I go to sleep," he said.

  Rooney produced three well-worn paperback mystery books, and Duncan chose the most promising one and took it home and to bed. All the while Duncan was reading, he couldn't stop pondering the mystery in his own house.

  * * *

  Jane rose the next morning before it was light, slipping into the jeans and shirt she'd been wearing when she found her way to the mine. Over those she put on the old coat, grateful that it was so warm and thick. It was bound to be cold outside.

  She folded the discarded shirt of Duncan's that she used for a nightgown and left it on the bed. Carefully, feeling her way in the dark and with only the night-light from the bathroom for illumination, she pulled the blue bedspread neatly over the bed and patted it into place. She would certainly miss this bed. It had been very comfortable.

  She left the comb and brush and toiletries in the bathroom. After a moment's thought, she pocketed the toothbrush. No one else would want it, and Duncan would end up throwing it away, which seemed to her to be an awful waste of a useful object.

  She tiptoed over to the heat register and picked up Amos, who, barely awake, snuggled unprotestingly inside her coat. Then, carefully and silently, she made her way downstairs.

  The house was quiet, the outlines of the furniture barely discernible in the dark. Tears stung her eyes as she made her way through the living room saying goodbye to everything. Goodbye, couch, she said to herself as she passed it. Goodbye, television set. Goodbye, fireplace. It seemed silly and sentimental to say goodbye to inanimate things, but at least it gave her words to occupy her mind. She was afraid that if she thought about how much she would miss all the comforts that most people took for granted, she might not be able to leave after all.

  She paused at the table beside the door. She felt around for the tray where Duncan kept his money. Her fingers closed around his wal
let. He was such a trusting soul, Duncan. A person shouldn't trust other people so much.

  She knew she had to survive somehow but felt terribly guilty about taking his money. She picked up the wallet anyway. She carried it into the kitchen, where she shifted her weight first from one foot to the other in indecision. Yet what else could she do?

  I'll pay it back, she thought. She set Amos down on the floor, and he immediately went to his food dish and started to eat.

  She knew the location of the switch to turn on the light over the sink, and she flipped it. She hadn't wanted to turn on any lights, but Duncan wouldn't be able to see this one from upstairs even if he got up, which she figured was unlikely at this hour.

  Quickly she scrawled a note on the pad beside the telephone.

  Duncan,

  I needed money, so I took some out of your wallet. I'll pay you back as soon as I can.

  Please think well of me, she added after a pause. That was stupid, considering that she was actually robbing the man. She didn't like the way the last sentence read but didn't want to scratch it out because then the note would look sloppy, and she didn't want him to think she was the kind of person who didn't care how a note looked to the person who received it. She signed it simply, "Jane."

  She checked the money in the wallet. There were sixty dollars, so after a moment's deliberation she took fifty and left him ten. She stuffed the money into her coat pocket along with a few packages of crackers that were on the counter and started to pick up Amos.

  He pulled away from her, something he did so infrequently that it took her by surprise. He continued to eat the cat chow that Duncan had left in the dish for him.

  At first she intended to let Amos finish the last of the food because she had no idea where their next meal would come from nor how long it would be until it materialized. Then she realized that there might not be any next meal for a long time and that she was being most unfair to Amos by taking him away from a place where he was sure to be warm and well fed. In the past week, his body had filled out and he didn't look so scrawny. His fur seemed thicker and sleeker.