We had exactly one of Joe Wheeler’s blankets left in the bed of the truck, and we snuggled up together underneath it, taking care to keep our skin from touching. The sky was just as clear as it had been when we hiked out of the Grand Canyon, and we could see a million stars, but now I wasn’t looking for Touch’s planet anymore. I was on Touch’s planet and he was on mine, the two of us Earthlings who never should’ve met.
He closed his arms around me tightly and whispered, “I love you,” into my hair. We were both exhausted. We had driven the truck way off the road, not into any kind of campground, just into a patch of rock and cactus, nobody around us for miles. Tired as we were, if we could’ve, we would’ve kissed. And kissed. And made love. My whole body ached to, and I knew his did, too. The thing is, we were too tired, with our brains not working well enough to get creative like we had in the past. If it weren’t for my dangerous, dangerous skin, it wouldn’t have mattered how tired we were, we could’ve just fallen on each other in all our sleepy, lovesick hunger.
But no. We had to use every ounce of strength we had left to restrain ourselves. And then we fell asleep, me risking my bare face near him, just so we could be together.
“Touch,” I said, my voice so hoarse and strained I barely recognized it. “That man with Alabaster.”
“Yes,” he said, sparing me speaking any more.
“He looked kinda like you. Who was he?”
“That was my father,” Touch said.
My body went real cold for a moment. Then I told myself it didn’t matter how messed up the future was. The present was pretty damn messed up, too. Maybe that’s what Cody had meant when he said there was only one world for me. Because this world now, and Touch’s world later, it was all the very same place.
I woke up before Touch and crept into the front of the truck, where I went over the atlas—one of the few valuable possessions we had left, along with Mary Ginsberg’s driver’s license and the golden ring. Hopefully Touch still had one of his fake IDs tucked inside that bottomless pocket of his. If he did, we only had about a three-hour drive before we could cross the border into Mexico. At least then we could quit worrying about police. With Wendy Lee alive and well and icing wedding cakes, the FBI would have better things to do than mount an international search for little old me.
So the only thing we had to do this morning was figure out how to get enough cash to keep our gas tank and our bellies full. I looked in the rearview mirror to see Touch, sitting up in the bed of the truck and waving.
I crawled on back there and stretched my legs out over his lap. He put his hands on top of my pants. I had been wearing those pants through so much, for so many days straight. What I needed was a good long shower and a change of clothing. We both needed a makeover, Touch and I, if we were going to get through the border check without drawing attention to ourselves. And in my head Mexico was becoming more and more important. The place where Touch would show me the sea. The place where the two of us would be together. Like the song in that old movie Cody’s mama used to like watching, “a place for us.”
In a little town called Buckeye, we found a Salvation Army store. Thanks to Joe Wheeler, Touch’s clothes—apart from the long leather jacket, which he didn’t have to wear—looked pretty close to normal. Except that those clothes had got beyond filthy in our little stay under Horseshoe Mesa. So we went into the store and gathered up a new pair of blue jeans for him, and a couple T-shirts, and a couple button-downs, plus a sweater. He changed into most of it in the grungy fitting room and put the rest in a backpack that we’d found in the school supply section. Then it was my turn. It was kind of pathetic how normal and pretty I felt wearing a pair of green cargo pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. I grabbed a big blue hoodie, too, which would be perfect for both covering up my hair and protecting my face (or other people from my face) when I needed to. I wound a filmy, flowery scarf around my neck and left my leather jeans and my bloodstained sweater right in the fitting room along with Touch’s discarded clothes. Then the two of us walked on out of the store without paying. Nobody even gave us a second glance.
While I’d been in the fitting room, Touch had pocketed a screwdriver, I guess in case we needed to steal another car. We drove toward Tempe, and then into a little town on the outskirts. I knew that plenty of people who spent the winter in Arizona wouldn’t have shown up yet. Our plan for the day was to find a little deserted house where we could shower and rest and eat up whatever dry and canned goods the owners had left behind. Then after a good night’s sleep we could figure out how to get gas for the truck and make our way across the border.
We followed a mail truck down a long, dusty drive. I figured we’d be able to tell which people were away for the season because the mailman wouldn’t put anything in their boxes. Must have been a lot of houses on this road in that situation, because he only delivered mail to a few. We waited until the little white truck had trundled back onto the main road, then we headed down the driveway at the very end of the dirt road. There we found this little tan-colored house with a red tile roof and flowers wilting in the window boxes. Touch did something funky with his screwdriver at the back door and we let ourselves in. The house was made out of clay, I guess, this style of house we’d been seeing since we got to Arizona, and once we got inside I could see why it was good building material for the climate. Inside it felt nice and cool; Touch started shivering as soon as we walked through the door. He found a nice thick sweatshirt hanging in the hall closet and bundled it on under his leather jacket. Then he set about searching for tools. He didn’t tell me what all he was up to, but I decided to just let him be while I explored the house.
Everything was so light and airy, with comfortable leather couches and pretty Indian rugs. The kitchen was huge, with a big stainless-steel stove and refrigerator, plus a walk-in pantry. In there I found all kinds of cans of soup and crackers and oatmeal and granola bars. I grabbed a package of cookies and walked on back through the house, so I could share them with Touch.
I found him in the sunroom. He had the little sack full of Grand Canyon crystals by his side, and he was kneeling by an electric socket holding the screwdriver. “Uh,” I said, “don’t put that in there.”
He looked up at me and smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out ways to add properties to this.” He held up the screwdriver and examined it like he’d never seen something so promising. “It’s a primitive design,” he said. “But it has potential.”
“Yeah, that’s us,” I said, handing him the cookies. “Primitive.” One thing I’d noticed about Touch on our travels, he had a sweet tooth.
I left him there to explore a little more. Something about the sun-filled house, all that light after the dark of the caves, made me feel safe and calm and happy. I liked knowing Touch was there without seeing him, working away on a project. “Hey,” I called to him when I found a nice little bathroom. “Take off your clothes.”
This got his attention. You would’ve thought he had a little wildebear in him, based on how fast he got to me. “What?”
I took a big, plush robe off its hook and threw it at him. “Take off your clothes,” I said. “I’m going to find the laundry room.”
It felt easy to forget we were both on the run as I puttered around, doing laundry, cobbling together lunch in that huge, comfortable kitchen. After we ate, we sat around wearing borrowed bathrobes while our clothes tumbled in the fanciest dryer I’d ever seen. I thought that the people who owned this house were crazy. Now, I am not a person who particularly enjoys the heat, but if I owned this house? You can bet I’d never leave it.
By now I was ready to get down to the thing I’d needed most when we first got to the house. A shower. I made my way into the biggest bedroom, which had the most beautiful adjoining bathroom I’d ever seen, more cool red tile under my feet, and all along the walls, too. The shower had three different heads that you could fiddle with and make spray you from different directions at different s
peeds. It was as near to heaven as I’d come, and I think I stayed in there going on half an hour without the temperature dropping down even a nick.
But the best discovery came on my way out of the bathroom, off the big bedroom, this little stairway that led up to a lookout tower where you could see the mountains. The Superstition Mountains, they were called, I knew that from the atlas. I stood up there for a while, enjoying the view, and on the way back down the stairway I peeked behind a little cedar door on the first landing. I had never been in one before, but I knew what it was right off (Wendy Lee’s memories again, that woman sure had been around). I ran fast as I could, which at this point was pretty damn fast, to the other side of the house, and the sunroom, to tell Touch to stop what he was doing and come on with me.
“What is it, exactly?” Touch said, poking his head in through the little wooden door. It smelled like eucalyptus and cedar. The room was tiny, like maybe five by five, and I pointed to the little wooden bench attached to the wall.
“You’ll see,” I said. I cranked up the little dials on the wall, then sat as far as I could from Touch on the bench and took off my robe. His eyes kind of narrowed, suspicious but in an interested way, and I put my head back against the wall, waiting for the steam to start.
The steam got so thick that I couldn’t actually see him as clear as I’d hoped. I tried to stare through it with my cat eyes, directly into his wide open face that was full of love and longing. And I hoped that if he could see me at all my look conveyed the picture in my mind, of his hands everywhere they wanted to go. No barriers at all, just the two of us, doing anything in the world we wanted. Because outside of my mind we could only sit naked on opposite sides, staring at each other, feeling the heat all around us.
I guess it was good that the refrigerator was empty except for a little box of baking soda. It at least comforted me that the owners of the house wouldn’t pull a Joe Wheeler and come waltzing on in. Still it would’ve been nice to have something fresh, eggs or herbs. While Touch finished up his work in the sunroom, I found some chicken breasts in the freezer, along with a square of frozen spinach. I thawed the chicken breasts in the microwave, then slathered them with barbeque sauce from the pantry and popped them in the oven. Then I cooked the spinach in a saucepan on top of the stove.
By now I was back in my Salvation Army clothes, minus the hoodie. I hadn’t bothered rummaging through any drawers here. I knew it was just survival, but I loved this house so much it sort of made me feel like I loved the people who lived here. There were a few framed pictures of a gray-haired couple, both wearing glasses and holding tennis rackets or golf clubs, plus family pictures of them with people who must’ve been their kids and grandkids. They all seemed nice and smiley, and why shouldn’t they be? I’d be smiling every day of my life if I lived in this house.
Touch had to steal clothing from them, to keep himself warm. I had to steal food, and I guess whatever electricity we were using to run the sauna and lights and so forth. But beyond that I felt I’d rather leave their things alone. Everything I used, like the plates I set out for our dinner, I would wash and put back where I found it. The candlesticks on the table had already been lit, so what harm, I figured, was there in letting them burn down a little more. When Touch came into the dining room, I was lighting them. We could smell the chicken baking in the kitchen, and the sun had started to set. Tomorrow Touch and I would cross the border into Mexico. Tonight we’d have a candlelit dinner.
But for some reason my sense of safety went down with the sun. I sat at the head of the table and Touch sat to my left. The sauna had warmed him up pretty good, so he just wore a knit hat, sweatshirt, and jeans. He sawed into his chicken and took a bite without saying it tasted good. Not that I’d worked hours to prepare it or anything, but still in all, I had cooked it. Would it have killed him to say it was delicious?
“That sauna,” he said, “is my favorite thing about this time. I might even sleep in there.”
And here I’d thought I was his favorite thing about this time! Don’t ask me what came over me. Earlier I’d felt so happy and so connected to him. Now, suddenly, I just felt… dark.
“So,” I said, spearing a piece of chicken. I put it in my mouth and chewed. I thought it was delicious, even if he didn’t. “What do you think Alabaster meant when she said that? About you not being who I thought?”
Touch stopped eating and stared at me. “She was trying to unnerve you,” he said, and then added, like I might be the stupidest person in the world, “of course.”
“Of course,” I repeated. The words tasted sour in my mouth. “How’d you two meet, anyway?”
“Meet?”
“Yeah. How’d y’all meet? It’s a pretty basic question.”
“Well,” Touch said. “Where I come from, in the future…”
“I know it’s the future,” I said. “We’ve established that pretty well by now. But it’s also the past, your past, and I’m wondering how you managed to fall in love with someone so evil. Someone who says you’re not who I think you are.”
“Well,” he said again. “She wasn’t always evil. She didn’t seem that way to me, at any rate. There was a sweetness about her. There still is, in ways. Especially when it comes to Cotton.”
Dang. I didn’t realize until he answered that I was hoping he’d tell me he’d never been in love with her.
But no. Apparently instead I’d set a little trap so he could wax all nostalgic for the beautiful innocent person Alabaster used to be, and in some ways still was.
“I knew her practically my whole life,” Touch said. “She was always so fragile. And so beautiful. Not as beautiful as you.” He added this last hastily enough to make it seem like a big fat lie. Anyway, I’d seen Alabaster and I’d seen myself. I knew who was winning in the beauty department, and it wasn’t the one with granny stripes in her hair.
Touch took a bite of spinach but didn’t find that any worthier of comment than the chicken, even though I’d sprinkled garlic salt on it. “The thing is,” he said. “Sometimes I really don’t think it’s her fault. She had people, her family, filling her head with all the wrong ideas. If you’re brought up on a notion from the time you’re very young, it can be very difficult to escape.”
“But your family felt the same way,” I said. “Your daddy wants things back the way they used to be. Before the Lincoln. And that didn’t rub off on you. You’re strong enough to fight right against him.”
Touch didn’t say anything. He just speared another piece of spinach and put it in his mouth. Then he said, “Alabaster was raised on the wrong ideas. She never really had a chance.”
“Right,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “She sure is innocent. I can see that now.”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
“I suppose it doesn’t bother you that she’s probably raising your child on those same ideas?”
“It bothers me more than anything,” he said. Touch looked pained, and downright misunderstood.
Suddenly I didn’t feel hungry. “Never mind,” I said, pushing my plate away. “I don’t feel much like talking anyway. You go ahead and sleep in the sauna.”
I marched out of the dining room and down the hall, and went on into one of the guest bedrooms. I didn’t want to be in the main bedroom, which Touch would have to go through so he could go into the sauna. Even in the dark I could see the outlines of the mountains through the windows, but suddenly I understood. The people who lived in this house, they weren’t smiley every day of their lives. No matter how perfect and wonderful and beautiful things seemed, it was always possible for sadness to come raining on down out of nowhere.
I got undressed and climbed under the covers. Part of me wanted to fall straight to sleep—maybe meet Cody on an astral plane as a little revenge—and part of me wanted, more than anything, for Touch to come looking for me.
He didn’t though, not for a long time. From way on the other side of the house, it sounded like he must’ve
finished his dinner. After a bit I could hear some clanking around in the kitchen, like maybe he was washing the dishes. I wondered if they had to wash dishes in Arcadia. Where I grew up, in Aunt Carrie’s old farmhouse, we didn’t even have a dishwasher. It seemed plenty enough like Arcadia just to pile the dinner dishes into that stainless-steel contraption, but Touch didn’t likely know how to use it.
Finally I heard him wandering around the house, opening and closing doors. It seemed like an awful long time before he opened my door. The lights in the hall were off, too—we’d already decided it wouldn’t do to light the place up, alerting any neighbors that the house was suddenly inhabited. In the dark, he padded across the tile and rug and then sat on my bed. He didn’t perch or sit toward the edge. He thumped right down, exactly next to me, so that his butt melded into the curve of my body under the blankets. He put his hand on my shoulder and I noticed he was wearing gloves. Not the thick, fat gloves he usually wore, but a thin suede pair. They looked soft, like they belonged to someone very rich. He must’ve found them in a drawer around here.
“Hey, Earthling,” he said.
“Hey yourself.”
“I come to you across a lot of years,” Touch said, in a low and very serious voice. “I’m older than you in several different ways, and I lived a life before I met you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you now. Because I do. I love you. Very much.”
“OK,” I said, real quiet, because suddenly I felt very silly for ruining our nice dinner for no particular reason.
“Rogue?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Now you say it.”
“What?”
“You know.” I liked the way his voice sounded, even though it sounded a little angry. It felt kind of fun—close—for him to be ordering me around.
Rogue Touch Page 19