Lightning That Lingers

by Sharon

  Tonight was her turn to drive, and she let Eleanor off with a friendly wave, turning down a hospitable offer to join her for popcorn and an episode of Masterpiece Theatre preserved on the video recorder.

  Inside she was drifting, her mind awash with the aggressive idiocy of what she was doing as she directed her old Volkswagen Beetle toward the Brooks mansion at Lily Hill. She knew only one thing. If she was going to Philip Brooks, she would have to do it quickly, before thought returned. Quickly and without thinking. Just do it, like a paratrooper making a jump into fog-saturated space.

  An arctic cold front had sliced the state and the steadily dropping temperatures were keeping the prudent indoors. Traffic was light on the country roads. Across the lake, she could see the lights of the village as a distant glitter that threw fading streamers on the lake's frosty glass. Within the curtain of trees, the towering ramparts of oak and maple, there was no light except that from the headlamps, piercing far in the clear, frigid air, yet revealing little beyond smoky tunnel glimpses of road and brush. The cold seemed to burn out even light.

  Her imagination flared, throwing up the disquieting fantasy that she was the last soul left on earth after a nuclear holocaust, utterly alone. Alone forever. She swallowed hard and turned on the radio for company, and heard the weather reporter announce with an eloquent shiver that the chill factor had dipped to sixty below. The public was advised to travel with a full tank of gas and stay with their cars in the event of breakdown. Jennifer glanced at her gas gauge. She had a quarter of a tank. Plenty. But the aged inadequate heater wheezed out air that was no better than lukewarm, and a stiff chilliness began to settle in her feet as they worked the brake and clutch. She could feel the thick wind tugging at the Beetle's light chassis.

  Her nerves were fine and tight, overstretched cords, by the time Philip's gateway loomed at the deserted roadside. The high wrought-iron gate was closed. If it was locked, she wasn't sure what she was going to do.

  Wind-drifted snow obscured the twenty or so feet leading to the gate. That meant trouble for the Beetle, so she crushed the accelerator seeking momentum as she made the turn. But it must have been too much momentum, because the little car landed on the driveway with a hop, its rear wheels catching in a hidden ice patch. The car sloughed around, showering snow powder, and spun off the drive, the engine-heavy rear end pulling it down a steep incline into a snowbank.

  For Jennifer, there was no time for fear, only a dense vision of a swirling world, a dizzying swing, a tumble backward that ended with a bump. In dumb surprise, she found herself sitting back inclined like an astronaut in an early space capsule. Panic, not plan, made her gun the wheels, burying the rear bumper in another foot of snow.

  She was not thinking clearly beyond a shaken inner monologue on her own stupidity when she got out of the car to assess her situation, leaving the engine running. More rattled than she knew, working on automatic reflexes, she stood in the snowbank, locked the door and slammed it shut. Then automatic faded to comprehension and she stared in disbelief at the silver key ring dangling back and forth, separated from her by a pane of glass. The swaying circle mesmerized her, and when it stopped she crossed her arms on the sloping yellow roof, buried her head against the chill fabric of her coat, and moaned in frustration.

  The wind snatched the sound; it tore with hooked claws at her rigid back. Her body awoke all at once to the cold. It framed her face in iron, wept like damp acid through her pants, blared in her muscles. Her stadium coat was fine for twenty and thirty degree weather, or for running from car to work to car to house. Tonight, it might have been Kleenex.

  Stay with the car. All right. She would run to the mansion, and if Philip wasn't home, she would run back to the car, smash in the window with a rock, and wait inside until help, in some form, arrived.

  The large gates were locked, but there was a smaller entrance not far down the wall that was open. She ran down the rutted driveway away from the slanting headlights of her VW, headlights that were shooting aimlessly into the swaying leaf-stripped trees above her head.

  I'm a penguin. I'm a penguin. I like cold weather, she thought, trying to dream it, believe in it.

  Night closed around her as the drive curved. The stars twinkled in a cloudless black sky, too distant for comfort. The trees arching over the drive seemed in their thrashing malevolence to want to deny her the small solace of the sight of the stars. The wind keened, a predatory chorus.

  She had expected the mansion to be close because the lake was out here somewhere, but the drive went on and on. Her breath came in dry puffs. Each step vibrated through her chilled joints in a shock wave.

  She pulled her hat over her ears as far as she could, and covered her mouth and nose with the muffler. Her breath made the cashmere damp, then ice-clogged, then raw agony on her flesh. The world was filled with harsh sound: the wind, her breathing, the fluttery scratch of her clothing. Her muscles had begun to contract rhythmically in shivers. As her eye fluids chilled, she tried to walk with her eyes closed but she stumbled in the darkness, falling twice. Even with her eyes open, she could barely make out the lane. The moon was dimmer than it had been a week ago when she was in the forest with Philip, but then, there were many sources of light in a night sky. Philip said so. She ought to be able to see.

  I'm a penguin. I don't mind cold weather.

  She looked up suddenly and saw it. Lily Hill.

  Still distant, it rose from the hilltop, a hard forbidding silhouette. Faint light glowed from etched-glass windows on either side of a grand formal entrance. In the flat moonlight it appeared huge, institutional, charmless. There must be someone home there. There must be. Relations, servants, Doberman pinschers.... People didn't leave their mansions unprotected, did they? Her mind fastened on Upstairs Downstairs, cataloguing episodes, examining habits of the rich.

  The rich didn't strip. Why did he do it? Rebellion? Hard times? How hard could times be if you owned a mansion?

  All at once, the snow heaved under her feet. She toppled through an underlying brittle ice crust into two feet of water. The pristine surface had hidden a spring-fed brook.

  Like frigid poison, the icy water bled through her clothes, lacerating her raw flesh, washing her in agony, convulsing her muscles. She tried to struggle up, but her burning wrists buckled and she slapped back into the water, her face filling with ice.

  When she stood at last, she could hear herself weeping. Pain came in racking paroxysms beyond any threshold she could have imagined. Winded, her body heaving with shudders, she tried to aim her clumsy steps toward the mansion and for the first time, she dazedly realized that she might die. Death. She rarely thought about it. It seemed like something removed from her mundane life, an exotic adventure. But if she didn't get help, she really might die. Her picture would be in the newspapers and people with busy lives would scan the article beneath and say "how sad, she was so young." But dumb. So dumb to have locked her keys in her car on a night when the chill factor was sixty below zero.

  There was no exact moment when she realized that her intellect had begun to malfunction. But distantly, she knew. Her actions pierced her awareness in sharp disconnected detail. Sorcery seemed to transport her from place to place.

  She was pounding her fists on the mansion door.

  She was trying to break in a window.

  She was walking down a country road looking for a mechanic to haul her car out of the ditch.

  I'm freezing to death, she thought. Me. Jennifer Hamilton. Won't everyone be surprised... She tried to cudgel her mind into coherency. She tried to recall whether she had actually knocked on his door. She tried to think. But thoughts vanished as though someone was plucking them like feathers from her mind.

  Where was she? A pretty night waved around her like a diorama in counted cross-stitch: black sky, airy starlight, trees moving in time to a wind that rang like clear crystal..***

  He almost decided not to come home.

  Michele called him to the phone j
ust after he came offstage from the second show. The caller was from his security service with the news that they were picking up an intrusion alarm from his house and asking if he wanted them to notify the police. He told them no, because most of the time it was something innocent. He didn't want the police to have to be chasing around on his property every time the wind tossed a branch on his roof or a wild owl heard Chaucer and went into a territorial frenzy against the kitchen window pane.

  He was tired, and sweaty, and tense, and in no mood to rush outside in arctic temperatures to hunt down a false alarm. But what if it was a group of kids, breaking into the abandoned west wing to party? A commotion would rub Chaucer the wrong way and when roused, the little owl was quite capable of descending, razor-sharp talons poised, on a threatening stranger. Could you live with it, Brooks, if a kid on a lark lost one of his eyes because you didn't want to go out in the cold to check out an alarm?

  He arranged for a stand-in and put himself in the car.

  The first thing he saw was the ditched Volkswagen, keys in the dead ignition, doors locked, the headlights faded to the pencil-beams of twin flashlights. It could have belonged to anyone. But somehow he knew it was Jennifer's.

  The wind's savagery had nearly destroyed the slight dents of her footprints leading up his drive. Fear nourished his impulse to break out in a run, following them. But he made himself get back into the station wagon; he made himself go slowly up the drive to be sure the dim trail didn't lead off into the trees. He had spent years learning to decipher tracks, and as though she had left a story for him in copperplate, he could see each stumble, each time she had rested or paused in confusion. The pressure of an accelerating pulse stabbed his throat; his heartbeat became militant, electric. The phrase, his phrase "come see me— you know where to look" came back at him like a whip. Where had he expected her to come? The Cougar Club?

  Her waifish figure finally appeared in his headlights, limping in a ragged ellipse about twenty yards from his front door. He floored the accelerator and spun up the drive, slamming the transmission into park, running up to her.

  Frost covered her in sparkling dust. It rimmed her eyes with blue-white lashes. It was imbedded into her clothing like mica in a sidewalk. When he lifted her face, her pansy petal eyes stared up at him unknowingly.

  "I'm looking at..." She squinted at the shining ice crystals on her sleeve. "Snowflakes." Her voice was hoarse, small and slurred.

  Shock? Delirium? He tried to remember everything he knew about hypothermia. His mind threw up a blank screen. His shooting heartbeat set the rhythm for his instinctive response. He swept her up in his arms and began racing with her toward the house. In his adrenalized state, she was no heavier than a toy.

  Her arms came sloppily around his neck, falling like broken pieces of stick candy. "I'm a penguin." Her head flopped hard onto his shoulder. "I like cold weather."

  Jenny. Jenny. Hang on, darling. Hypothermia. What do I know about hypothermia? In warmblooded animals, enzymatic reactions take place properly only within a set range of temperatures. When prolonged chilling forced the body's temperature down too long, the chemical processes began to misfire. Muscles grew lax—the heart was a muscle....

  Supporting her limp weight in one hand, he dragged open the front door and lifted her inside. She murmured incoherently as he carried her upstairs through the blocks of indigo moonlight on the landing. He booted open his bedroom door and set her down on his bed where she lay on his yellow quilt like a broken doll. His hand slipped under the muffler to touch her cheek. It might have been ice.

  He grabbed the receiver of his bedside phone and dialed rapidly, forcing the dial. When it began to ring he tucked it into his shoulder and started to pry at the ice-encrusted zipper of her coat. Her clothes, moisture saturated, had frozen to rigidity. An anonymous voice came on the phone and informed him, after he asked, that Dr. Campell wasn't available. He's with a woman, Philip thought. He snapped out that this was Philip Brooks and an emergency. The bland voice advised him glumly that he would be connected.

  In the extended delay, he unwrapped the frosty muffler from her face and realized that it was his. Staring at it, he had the utterly stupid feeling that he might begin to cry.

  Jack's voice. "I don't know who the hell this is but it better be important."

  "Jack, this is Philip. Can you come over?"

  "Philip?" The voice sharpened. "What's going on? Are you all right?"

  "Yes. Jenny's with me. I found her outside. She looks like a snow cone."

  Even more sharply, "Is she conscious?"

  "Semiconscious."

  "Other symptoms?" Jack snapped out.

  "Ataxia, dysarthria, disorientation. And her damn zipper is frozen shut."

  "Steady. All right? What's her pulse?"

  He dragged off her mitten and found her wrist. "Dear God, I can't find one."

  "Be calm, Philip." The voice became deliberately healing, stern, sustaining. "If she's semiconscious she's alive and she's got a pulse. Maybe it's thready, but you'll find it. I'll be there in a minute. Pull her clothes off and put her under a blanket. Don't put her in a hot tub. Don't put her in a heating blanket, or you may throw her into shock. Did you catch all that?"

  "Yes. What about an ambulance?"

  "We'll decide when I get there." The line went dead.

  The thawing zipper broke free and as he brought it down past her waist, he saw her wide-set eyes focus on him with sudden lucidity.

  "What's ataxia?" The words were quite clear, but very hoarse.

  "Jenny? Sweetheart, this is Philip. Do you know me?"

  "Ataxia," prompted the blue lips softly.

  "It means loss of coordination," he told her gently.

  "Thanks." The barely audible word was sardonic. She seemed to be trying to smile. "Dysarthria?"

  "Slurred speech."

  "Why do you know those words?"

  He raised her shoulders enough to drag her coat off. "I'm a biologist."

  "Biologist. Biologist." She gave the word various amazed inflections.

  He had a moment to be elated over that evidence of rationality before her eyes closed and she seemed to drift again. She shivered so pitifully it wrenched his heart. He would have given everything to be able to take her pain.

  All the way to his fingertips he could feel the pressure of his emotions as he began to open her blouse. Her dazed husky whisper startled him.

  "Philip... Are you going to make love to me?"

  "Yes, God help us both." He touched a shaken kiss to her cold brow. "When you're better."

  Her heavy lashes dropped, her fist curled drowsily near her cheek as he undressed and dried her. She seemed to have fallen into a light sleep under his wool blanket when he carried her damp clothes to the bathroom. He returned to find her wandering around his bedroom with the blanket wrapped around her, trailing it behind her like a besotted monk.

  "I have to find a mechanic," she rasped softly, gazing vaguely around the room. "I have to get my..." She thought about it for a long time—"my 'wagon fixed."

  He smiled for the first time since he had walked away from her in the library, and scooped her up, a droll, weightless bundle, depositing her back on the bed, nuzzling his face in her damp hair. "I'll fix your wagon but good if you don't stay still."

  For Jennifer, consciousness returned at broken intervals as though the world were a thing seen through erratically swinging shutters.

  Distantly she saw herself clinging to Philip's arm and heard her own excited rambling. "Philip, I was lost in the freezing cold. I had an adventure.... I faced death." Someone was trying to put something in her mouth. "I knew it wasn't dark, because you told me about all the light in the night sky—besides the moon and the stars there's air glow... all the light from outside the galaxy—faint stars, interstellar dust...."

  Her jaw was taken in a firm grip and she found herself staring into a vaguely familiar face, with amused gray eyes and tousled curls. She was told sternly, "Oral
temperatures are unreliable enough in your condition. Either keep this under your tongue, young lady, or it's going in your rear end. No matter what Philip says."

  Pained tears spilled, she found the comfort of Philip's chest, the thermometer went under her tongue. She drifted.

  She woke once with warm hands feeling her pulse, stroking her hair. The hand that led her to consciousness was gentle, as was the voice calling her name, but it hurt to be awake. The light in the room was dim. But even that stung her eyes.

  A soft voice said, "She's adorable. Lucky you. Have you made her a happy woman yet?"

  "I've made her a confused woman. I've made her a frightened woman. As you see, I've made her a very ill woman. But no, I haven't made her a happy woman."

  "All these years I've known you, and here I've always thought nothing got to you except injured wildlife. You were so well vaccinated against women by the time you were fifteen. Personally, I'm in favor of anyone who can make you feel like a human being again. What do you think it's doing to the people who love you, watching you cut yourself off like this?" The attractive male voice developed a sudden impatience that seemed rooted in pain. "All right, I understand why you wouldn't take the vice-presidency in your uncle's company. But when you know I'd give you all kinds of money... Don't give me that look of yours. I'm not going to resurrect that hopeless battle."

  A silence grew and stretched.

  Two minutes or two hours later she opened her eyes. Her field of vision was blurred, distorted. An ornate plasterwork ceiling swung above her head. The walls were lovely, elaborate with gilt touches. There was a massive carved marble hearth with a stuffed owl on it. She had the strangest feeling that she had been transported back in history like the heroine in a time travel romance. This room came straight out of the Victorian era.

  The detail of the owl bothered her. It seemed incongruous. She closed her eyes again, experiencing a wash of nauseating discomfort. Her skin felt as though it had been seared. Every muscle, every joint in her body cried out for mercy. And her head throbbed, throbbed, throbbed.