Time passed, but it could be hard to tell.
At first, that bothered me. At first, I went a little nuts when I realized that no phone or TV or internet or microwave in the kitchen meant no way to know the time – I hadn’t owned a watch since smartphones came to town, and although Devon wore Rolexes at work and for public appearances, he’d disappeared them all somewhere before we hit Montana.
I calmed down when I found an old battery-powered clock in a kitchen cabinet; but after I mounted it above the bed with a sigh of relief and then turned my back, Devon hid the thing. Three days in, I got desperate enough to sneak out to the SUV and turn the key in the ignition just enough to bring up the digital time display, so he took my keys and disappeared them too.
So I saved my sanity by deciding that my best guess was the right time, and with no clocks, who could say I was wrong?
And it did stop mattering after a while – in fact, a lot of things mattered less and less as the days and the nights flowed past.
Somewhere in there, I stopped looking for my phone. I couldn’t call out, and besides, I had one seriously fascinating kazillionaire to talk to all day – so why bother with that endless river of yammering voices on my contacts list?
One morning, I noticed as we headed out the door for a hike that all the electronic gear slumbering on the desk was getting dusty and then some – should I clean it off, just for appearances’ sake, or throw a sheet over the mess and call it good?
At some point or other, I just stopped looking in that corner.
Devon didn’t much care for taking a turn at Stephen King in our reading sessions – he declared that he found the master of modern horror’s prose ‘pedestrian and crude,’ and refused to hear me when I explained the guy could write the hell out of the experiences of regular, everyday, non-billionaire Americans. So I figured, let’s douse the electric lights and get him to read “The Shining” by candlelight, because that would set the proper mood, right?
It did, I had a seriously freaky nightmare as a result, and we read by candlelight again the next night. And the next. And then I decided I liked the coziness of all those flickering candles no matter what we were reading, and the electric lights started gathering dust too.
Besides, the most amazing lights you could imagine were in the sky.
On nights when King and Dostoyevsky didn’t fit the mood of the moment, Devon took me outside and showed me the stars. It was too cold to lie on the ground at night, so we’d take a couple of folding cots down to the river, stretch out on those, and stare up at the Milky Way.
Believe me, if you have only ever lived in a city, you have never seen the night sky. All those headlights and spotlights and neon lights and yard lights and street lights drown out all but the brightest and bravest stars – but drive out to the country, away from all that overlit craziness, and you’ll see, probably for the first time, the blazing river of stars that is the Milky Way.
Galaxies rule.
Thousands of fiery diamonds spilled across the sky, and that first time, all I could do was gawk at their glory, my mouth hanging open like an awestruck country gal seeing a big city for the first time.
It was like the icy torrent that rumbled through the valley, only this one marched past far above our heads, with one brilliant pinprick of light and a dozen more for every splashing drop of the river. Nebulas and gas and dust, the occasional meteor streaking past, familiar constellations and so many I’d never seen before – you could spend every night staring up at that caravan of beautiful strangers traveling through the sky, and see something new each time.
Of course, they weren’t strangers to Devon – being the knowledge junkie that he was, he knew all their names. He taught me so many, more than I could ever remember – I learned where to find Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us and still over twenty-four trillion miles away, I learned the names of every shimmering point of light in the Big Dipper, and I discovered that the steady, non-twinkling lights were planets in our own solar system. Hi, Jupiter! Most of those meteors darting past were no bigger than grains of sand, according to Devon, while some of the stars were giant nuclear furnaces that could swallow our own sun whole with room to spare.
I resolved to be an astronomer in my next life.
You might think it was a little scary sometimes, looking up at all that infinity. You’d think it would make you feel smaller than those sand grain meteors, to look into an ocean of space and time that didn’t know or care that you existed – but that’s not how it seemed to me.
With every night that passed as I looked up at the Milky Way, it was the city that seemed further and further away, and less and less important. Here, I was one girl staring down an army of stars – there, I was one hurrying girl among millions of hurrying people, and I meant less than nothing to most of them. Personally, I’d rather mean nothing to the stars.
One night as Devon and I looked up at the stars, I thought about that distant life back in the city, and a question occurred to me.
“Yo, big guy.”
He angled his head toward me, and raised an eyebrow – and if you’d ever spent a night under the Milky Way, you’d know that yes, you can see that much detail by starlight. “What does my Ashley wish of me?”
“Devon, while we’re out here, are you … well, are you the least bit bothered about being completely out of touch with your multi-billion dollar global corporate empire? All that mega-huge financial machinery churning away without you, employees left to their own devices – does it worry you, at least a little?”
I thought a bit and added, “After all, maybe all those executives have fucked up in hilarious and improbable ways while we’ve been gone, and now you’re dead broke – ever think of that?”
“No. Not at all. Not for one moment.” He turned away and stared back up at the stars – and somehow, he was suddenly as cold and distant as they were.
“So why aren’t you worried?”
Devon sighed. “For two reasons. One, if I have chosen my employees well, they do not need constant supervision and are managing quite well without me. If I have not chosen well and return to find my business affairs in disarray, at worst I will have lost a paltry few million here and there, while learning the valuable lesson that I did not in fact choose well. Then I simply replace the incompetents with new people who will do better, and the machinery of Killane Corporate Holdings will thunder on as before.”
“And the second reason is …?”
He smiled up at flaming-white Rigel, at the red giant Betelgeuse, and at all the other teeming thousands of stars, and somehow it was one of the saddest smiles I’d ever seen.
“The second reason is a fantasy. A foolish and self-indulgent fantasy, and surely one that anyone who toils for a living would hate me for, but … Ashley, sometimes I imagine going back and finding that it’s all gone. I arrive home to find that I am no one and nothing, without a dime to my name or anyone who knows me. I walk the streets with only the clothes on my back, one forgotten face among millions, and … Ashley, that would be the sweetest thing I could imagine. I would be free.”
I so did not like this fantasy. It felt … wrong, in more ways than I wanted to think about.
“Free from what, Devon?”
“Free from myself, sweet innocent Ashley. Free from the fate I have earned.”
Then he fell silent, and he didn’t say a word for the rest of the night.
Devon was silent a lot after that. Some days, he barely said anything at all. As I lost track of all things shiny and digital, as I lost my fear of the wild, he said less and less – sometimes, when I asked about a star, or a mountain, or some bird I’d never seen before, he didn’t answer; he just pulled me close, wrapped his arms around me, and buried his face in my hair.
I wasn’t scared of nature so much any more, but I became very scared of the weirdness inside his head. He wasn’t retreating from me, not exactly, but … what was going on?
I figured it out when we were readi
ng one night, maybe a bit less than two weeks into our stay. I was the one pulling reading duty, because Devon’s silence now extended to books – sure, he said it was just because he loved listening to my voice, but I knew there had to be a lot more to it than that.
I sat cross-legged on the bed and pulled a fat volume about Robert E. Lee off a shelf, because Devon consumed Civil War books like I gobbled down gummi bears. I gambled that chapter after dust-dry chapter about Lee gadding about fighting here and there had to draw my guy out of his shell, right?
Wrong.
He sat on the couch, when usually we snuggled together on the bed to read – and yes, some of those reading sessions ended in a lot more than snuggling, but not this time.
This time, he sat by himself on the couch and tilted his head in my direction, waiting to hear the silky smooth reading voice I totally didn’t have. He waited the same way a tree waits, or a rock. This did not look promising, but like Lee, I soldiered on against all odds.
In less time than it took the old guy to blow Gettysburg, I knew I wasn’t winning this battle either.
“ ‘Reinforcements from A.P. Hill’s division arrived on the left flank at noon, and Lee ordered the Texas volunteers commanded by John Bell Hood to lead the charge shortly thereafter. Within minutes, the Union line was in chaos, as the Confederate heavy artillery hurled incendiary shells into the ranks of untried, unblooded clerks from Massachusetts, farmers from Vermont, and terrified men from Ohio who were barely more than boys. Explosions tore the earth open at their feet, bullets from Hood’s advancing Texans tore open their comrades, and the survivors ran like deer.’ ”
I looked up from the carnage to see Devon staring out the window at the night. He might have been listening, but I didn’t think so – I’d gotten to know that distant, nobody-home look on his face all too well. Just to be sure, though, I put him to the test.
“ ‘But just as Hood’s troops swarmed forward over the fallen bodies of their foes to deliver the final, killing blow to the Union center, Grant sent forward reinforcements of his own. These battle-hardened Pennsylvania regulars were armed with plasma rifles that burned through the advancing Confederates like a hot knife through butter. Sweeping in on either flank to support the Pennsylvania boys were Sheridan’s Martian cavalry units, and the mere sight of their three-headed mounts breathing fire and farting methane was enough to send the remaining men in grey staggering back in full retreat.’ ”
And, drum roll, it didn’t work – a quick glance over the top of the book revealed Devon was still staring out the window. I thought about adding how Lee signed the final surrender papers with General MacArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri while Nirvana played ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in the background, but decided against it.
I decided against it because suddenly I knew exactly what he was listening to as he sat there, and it wasn’t my voice.
It was the terrible, remorseless beat of that countdown clock. I’d first heard its ticking in Chicago, hiding between Devon’s words, marking off the minutes until some unknown deadline. Now it was back.
Had I set it off again by asking that question about his business down by the river, as the Milky Way blazed overhead? I didn’t know, just like I didn’t know what the hell the countdown signified when I told Uncle Sheridan about it – I just knew that it was still thundering away inside Devon’s head, getting louder as each desperate minute drained away, and how could I have missed hearing it?
Maybe that’s why we here. Maybe the whole idea of coming here was for me to be distracted by the trees and the alleged bears and the burned eggs and the elk and the stars, so I wouldn’t hear that damn clock again until it was too late.
I thought it over while I didn’t read and he stared, and I decided I was done with maybe – it was time to make this strange, broken guy I couldn’t help but love tell me what was going on, before it was too late for knowing to make any difference.
Tick, tock.
35. Confession
I snapped the book shut. A puff of dust rose from the pages, and then I tossed all those soldiers and explosions onto the floor. The leather-bound volume thumped onto the pine planks like a spent cannonball, Devon twitched and looked around as if he was waking up from a dream, and I did my best to take charge of the situation – like Lee cleaning up the place with blue uniforms after the Seven Days battles, if you squint hard and use tons of imagination.
“Devon, why are we here?”
He stared at me with those peculiar, unforgettable eyes.
“Devon, why are we here, really? Don’t tell me it was to see off the last dusty bits of Uncle Sheridan, because we squared that away in the first five minutes. Granted, the place has grown on me since then, just like you said it would, but getting me in tune with the great outdoors is not why you insisted on coming here, is it?”
He glanced once more, just once, into the kingdom of night outside the window, and then he stood up. I noticed he still insisted on being way taller than was reasonable.
“I should have known you wouldn’t let me escape.”
Instead of elaborating, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looked around, and his gaze landed on the kitchen.
“Ashley, might we have a midnight snack while I answer your question? Granted, it actually feels like somewhere between nine and ten o’clock – but a midnight snack sounds rather more appropriate for a confession, don’t you think?”
“Confessions are for guilty people, big guy, and I’d bet serious money you’re not guilty of anything that needs confessing.”
He turned on one heel. He tilted his head to one side, and he stared at me like a giant, handsome, odd-eyed scarecrow.
“Ashley, I am guilty of more than your kind heart can imagine.”
He kept staring.
Pins dropped on every planet in the solar system.
Suddenly that midnight snack sounded pretty good.
Five minutes later, I lounged in a chair at the table in the cabin’s kitchen corner, while Devon and our temperamental woodstove conspired to produce bacon and eggs.
The big guy selected strips of bacon with the professional eye of a surgeon deciding on the right scalpel. Once they were sizzling in the iron skillet that he said was the only kind of pan that could cook bacon properly, he glanced over at me.
“Ashley, I must say that breakfast seems like an odd sort of meal for this time of night – are you quite certain you wouldn’t rather have sandwiches, or soup, or perhaps even a nice little slice of sirloin?”
“You, Devon Killane, are accusing me of being odd?”
He nodded, adding a smile almost made it to his eyes. “Point taken.”
“Besides, as a veteran of a lot of midnight breakfasts, I can testify that bacon and eggs are great food for the soul and perfect confession fuel – get a whole lot of grease and cancer-causing nitrates under your belt, and you’ll confess to all kinds of crap, trust me. So keep frying, evil guilty boy.”
My eggs arrived at the table in the form of a ham-cheese-and-gobs-of-green-peppers omelet, and right behind came a platter piled high with grease-dripping bacon that could make you gain weight and have a heart attack just by looking at it.
Orange juice chilled to within an inch of its life followed, condensation dripping down the sides of the glass pitcher as Devon set it next to the bacon. He brought over his own plate of scrambled eggs, he sat down across from me, and that was it.
Confession time.
He didn’t try to waffle or evade or drag things out any longer, I’ll give him that – he got right down to business.
“Ashley, I did not bring you here to deceive you.”
He looked at me and into me, and he never broke eye contact while he forked up a helping of scrambled eggs.
“I brought you to these mountains because there are certain things you deserve to know, things you need to hear before … well, before.”
He chewed.
Before? Before the hell wha
t?
He swallowed.
“I brought you to this place to hear these awful things because this forest, that meadow and our river, and the granite mountains that climb to the clouds have always brought me closer to peace than anything else ever has – until I discovered the safe haven of your arms.”
He picked up the pitcher and poured a stream of orange juice into his glass. He filled my glass too, although I hadn’t asked him to, seeing as how I was too busy staring at him, staring at him and wanting to wrap those safe arms of mine around him and stop this confession before it got started, because I’m a coward that way.
He put the pitcher back down with a decisive thunk, and I watched the juice in my glass shimmer as a faint vibration ran through it.
“I thought that here, in the midst of this calm and quiet and safety, I could find the strength to tell you what you need to hear from me. Instead, it seems that I have deceived myself.”
My voice was so small, I could barely hear myself. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s quite all right, I will explain.”
He sipped his juice, in much the same way he would have during a break at a business meeting about stock options and market indicators and a thousand other dry, passionless financial mysteries. Was all of that really still waiting for us out there? Did we have to go back to it?
“Rather than using this interlude to focus myself and find strength, I have instead used it to escape. I have escaped by teaching you how to love this place as I do, by showing you the wild creatures and watching the stars beside you, by walking the trails at your side, by reading to you, and by talking with you about everything except what I came here to talk about.”
He lifted three slices of bacon from the mountain of greasiness on the platter between us, settled the piggy goodness on his plate, and looked up at me.
I stared back, forcing myself to keep eye contact. What was this confession that was coming? What did he do? More likely, what did he think he’d done?
I knew right down to the marrow of my bones that he wasn’t cheating on me, that wasn’t it – he couldn’t have done that any more than the sun could have casually decided to come up in the west one morning. Was he … did he maybe have a terminal illness? Was that what he was working up to telling me? Or perhaps ‘before’ referred to –
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 41