by Ruth Wind
"I imagine John should be back here pretty soon," Ben said, and raised an eyebrow in reluctant acknowledgement of a world beyond the two of them.
"Real life must return, I suppose," Heather observed. She savored the salty flavor of her sandwich and sighed. "I hate to see it happen."
"You don't have to go, you know." Ben reached over the table to twine his long fingers with hers. His brown eyes were sober and sweetly, coercive. "We could snuggle and watch TV, or maybe you could play the guitar for me."
"I don't have my guitar with me."
"I've got one. It has metal strings, but it plays."
She cut him a suggestive glance. "What will you do for me if I play the guitar for you?"
He laughed, showing his even teeth below the thick mustache. "Whatever you want."
"I might be persuaded." The truth was, she had nothing pressing to do and no desire to leave this magical enclave. Her spirit soared from the shower of healing water he'd poured upon her. She felt cleansed and refreshed, tingly and glowy—even sexy and beautiful. Every time her glance landed on Ben's rugged, sun-lined face within its frame of black hair, she could scarcely believe her good fortune and couldn't accept that he seemed to feel the same way about her.
Now his eyes leaped with the dancing humor she'd grown so fond of. "Name it."
She grinned. "Show me your office, Mr. Shaw—where all those books are created."
"Ah, a groupie. I knew it," he said with mock disappointment. "You want me to put on my spurs and whip, too?"
Heather couldn't resist the double entendre. A laugh gurgled in her chest. "That might be interesting, indeed, Mr. Shaw."
"Wench." He stood. "C'mon. You can bring your sandwich."
His limp, which Heather had rarely noticed since the train journey, was rather pronounced tonight and she noted he used the wall for support. As playfully as possible, she took his arm. "May I escort you, sir?"
The glance he threw her way was grateful, yet wry, as if he acknowledged both her recognition of his limp and her attempt to spare his pride.
He led the way to the back of the house to a room obviously added on at one time or another. Three walls were lined with windows. The last light of day glowed over a dark line of mountain peaks rising like a jagged curtain along the horizon.
Ben flipped on a lamp. "As you can see, I'm not the most organized housekeeper in the world. I don't often entertain visitors here."
Heather suddenly wondered if she was intruding. "Do you mind bringing me here?"
"Heck, no. It kind of makes me feel good, to tell you the truth." He glanced around the room, as if viewing it through her eyes. "Not much to it."
That was hardly true, Heather thought, as she drank in the essence of the office. A simple desk furnished with a typewriter was pushed against one wall and a neat stack of paper sat beside it, with a battered dictionary acting as paperweight. There the neatness ended. Papers and books were piled against filing cabinets, and notes were pinned up hurry-scurry over a corkboard. In one corner sat an overstuffed chair and ottoman next to a pine table with an overflowing ashtray. "Seems like it ought to be against the law to smoke in here," Heather commented, gesturing.
He looked up from a flaring match, smiling guiltily as he exhaled. "It's automatic. Everything in here's coated with six inches of tar."
Heather made a face and finished her examination. On the wall without windows was a series of framed magazine covers and book jackets; and whatever he said about tar, each showed evidence of recent dusting. Impulsively she turned. "Why do you act so casually about what you write?"
He squinted against the smoke of his cigarette, his stance automatically and unconsciously defensive. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yes, you do." She cocked her head. "Every time it comes up, you sort of shrug it off like it's a game. It can't be—not the way you write."
Ben held her gaze without speaking for a moment. "Something like the way you hide your music?"
"I'm not as talented as you are. I'm really mediocre as a musician."
Ben sank into the desk chair. "Well, I can't speak for the excellence of your playing. It impresses me because I can't do it. But if that composition you performed on the steel mill is any indication of your talent as a composer, you're the next Segovia."
At the mention of the steel-mill piece, Heather felt something tug at her memory. She frowned for a moment, then brushed it away. "No way. That piece was just luck—"
She broke off in a flush of overwhelming horror. With widened eyes, she scanned the room for a calendar. "Oh, my God. What's the date today?" A thudding sickness enveloped her belly and every good emotion she'd been feeling sank straight through the floor.
Ben stood up. "What is it?"
Heather desperately tried to stem the flood of panic in her chest. Maybe she'd miscounted. Her eyes found a small bank calendar on the wall just above the desk. Sunday, November 9. A wave of weakness smashed her knees and she nearly buckled before Ben's strong grip snagged her arm. The weight pulled on his bad leg and both of them nearly fell.
"Sit down before we both kill ourselves," he said harshly.
Heather's hands were trembling so badly she had to force them together on her lap. "James died today," she whispered, aghast all over again at the realization of how she'd spent this anniversary. Cold shame racked her spine.
"Heather, it was three years ago." He knelt in front of her. "Don't let it get to you."
"How can you say that?"
"People die. Somebody dies on every day of the calendar."
It was the same argument she'd heard a thousand times from Mike, and she jumped up. "Go ahead and tell me I'm going to see this date once a year for the rest of my life," she replied with a shaking voice. "Go ahead and tell me you can't wall yourself off because someone dies." Now anger mixed with the violence of her reaction and the whole of her internal organs seemed to tremble and flame all at once.
Ben looked at her, his hands on his hips. "That's exactly what I was going to say."
"Well, James didn't just die," she proclaimed sharply.
He didn't look shocked or curious or any of the other things she expected. He simply nodded. "I know." There was a slight edge of impatience in his tone. "He shot himself. I'm sure it was gruesome and horrible and ugly. I'm sorry you had to find him."
"How did you know I found him? Did Mike fill you in on all the gory details?" Her chest felt as if it would explode. She had to get out of there, had to get back to town.
A pulse jumped in his jaw. "I already knew most of it, Heather. Mike just plugged the gaps."
The knowledge that he'd learned the ugly secrets of James's death made her feel invaded. Her eyes narrowed. "Did Mike also tell you that I made him do it?"
"Damn it, woman, what are you talking about?" Ben's voice rose. "James was always weak."
She slapped him hard. "How dare you!"
When she pulled back for a second hit, he grabbed her arms in a steely grip, his own temper blazing. "I dare because I can't stand to see you wasting yourself over somebody who didn't deserve you." He dragged her, fighting and kicking, toward the window.
"You have no right to make those judgments," she shrieked.
"He's dead, Heather!" His nearly black eyes blazed. He threw open a window, one hand bruisingly holding her arm. He grabbed a handful of snow and pressed it to her neck. "You feel that? That means you're alive." His lips took hers, violent and hot and mindless, then released them. "That means I am."
With an abruptness that nearly sent her sprawling, he released her. "Now, if you want to go lie with a dead man, you go ahead."
Confused and utterly unable to think, Heather stood in the center of the room, gasping. She watched as Ben crossed the floor and scrabbled in a desk drawer. He threw her a ring of keys. "My car's outside. Go ahead. I surely won't hold you here against your will."
For the briefest, longest moment, she hesitated. Icy snow slid into the collar of her shirt. Ben's eyes b
ored into the depths of her soul. Her chest ached and her eyes burned and her lips felt battered. As she bent to pick up the keys that had landed at her feet, a pull of sore muscles reminded her of the way she'd spent the day, and a sharply focused picture of James, as big as a movie close-up, blotted everything else from her mind.
In mortification, she fled outside, barely hearing Ben's harsh curse behind her.
The snow had ceased, but the roads were snow-packed and probably icy. Heather gazed in dismay at the open expanse of white, and her fear of bad roads nearly cut through the turmoil of shame and humiliation she felt. For one brief second, she thought of calling a cab, but the thought of returning to the house, to the snapping judgment of Ben's eyes, to his cutting words, then waiting a solid hour for the cab, decided her. She flung open the car door.
He had no right to talk about James like that, she thought furiously as she pumped the accelerator and cranked the ignition. Before the war, James had planned to enter the priesthood—not the vocation of a weak man; only that of a sensitive one.
The car was obviously well maintained, for the engine caught and held immediately. Heather shivered, coatless, while it warmed up. She wouldn't even risk going back for her coat.
As it turned out, she didn't have to. Ben appeared on the porch, his features unyielding and distant. Without even descending the steps, he tossed the coat onto the hood of the car and went back inside. The abrupt gesture, so angry and disdainful, sent a sharp pain through Heather's middle, as real as if he'd punched her. Some portion of her whirling brain screamed a half-formed protest as she climbed out of the car to shake off the coat and put it on. The door to the cabin was shut tight and Heather thought of the warmth beyond, of the sandwich she hadn't finished and the fire they might have had later.
Heavy, thudding guilt intervened. If James had died in a car accident, by now she would be able to enjoy the loving company Ben offered; she would be free to love him in return. Unfortunately, James had killed himself because his wife couldn't deal with the ugly realities of his war days; because she'd been horrified at confessions he had laboriously made—after years of knowing her; after Heather had begged to share his past with him.
Her misery was so intense as she drove back to Pueblo that she drove automatically over roads that indeed were very slick. Ben had good tires on the front-wheel-drive import and it hugged the road with secure control. Heather's mind wandered bleakly over the unbroken white of the landscape, caught in a familiar and hated cycle of memories. As night fell, her mood dipped even further. She hadn't even made it to James's grave on the anniversary of his death, she berated herself. Instead, she'd spent the day wrapped in heedless passion, laughing and playing with Ben like a liberated virgin, mindless and free.
But she wasn't free, and she would never be so again. Her sheltered and protected childhood hadn't prepared her for the depth and power of another person's pain. She'd ruined one life with her narrow background, and Ben deserved someone stronger.
She made it home in just under an hour. The house was dark, and loomed like a haunted castle before her, almost leering with an obscene aura of tragedy. For a long time, Heather couldn't bear to go inside. She sat in the driveway with her hands wrapped around the steering wheel, staring at the building's cold facade. I hate this house, she thought suddenly. She'd always hated it—the stolidness and lack of imagination and air and light. On winter mornings, the living room was so dark it felt like a cave thanks to heavy pines that blocked what little light there was. The flowers grew in precise, ordered rows that were so unlike nature they looked unreal.
Everything she hated about it, James had loved. He'd worshiped order and solidity, which was one thing about him Heather didn't miss. He'd hated the house to fall into disorder, and like her family, had wanted meals at the same time every day, to the point of driving her crazy. He would have been well suited to a scholarly life, living behind the bricked walls of a secluded monastery. The thing was, Heather thought, no such place existed anywhere that she knew of. The priests and nuns of her childhood had been ordinary men and women, involved in the community and the schools and with people. James wouldn't have done well trying to live that sort of life.
With a ripping, searing sense of justice, she realized she hated James as much as she hated the house. She hated him for cheating her and making her feel so rotten. He hadn't even left a note—just the gory remains of his act where she would be sure to find them.
She got out of the car heavily. Neither hating the house nor hating James were new emotions. They were a regular part of this yearly ritual. With a deep sigh, she unlocked her door and prepared to fight the ghosts of this night's coming.
* * *
Ben's first impulse was to drink a bottle of whatever he could get his hands on and then rip the house to pieces. Ten years ago, that's exactly what he would have done. He contented himself with a curse and a fist slammed into a wall. The gesture brought a wry grin to his face. Can't even get properly mad, man. He grimaced when he recalled the childish toss of her coat onto the hood of the car. That had been about on a par with his behavior in his earlier years.
He'd never hit a woman in his life—discounting his sisters, who hit back just as hard. But as he'd watched Heather shrink from the voluptuously alive woman who'd made love with him with the abandon of a magnificent lioness into the haunted, confused little girl she'd become within seconds, he'd wanted to hit her—not to hurt her, but to wake her up to her real life which was speeding past her with the same fury his own life had bypassed him while he'd hidden from his own ghosts.
His running had taken place in dozens of bars in the arms of dozens of women. His ghost had been the self he'd wanted to be, the man who'd made crowds roar furiously when he leaped onto the back of a bucking bronco.
Like James, Ben had also run from the nightmare of combat—the same in all wars, if what his father said about the Pacific was anything to judge by. Whoever kept thinking up these wars sure didn't have to fire the rifles. Human beings weren't cut out for that rot—an opinion that slipped into his novels over and over and over again.
He lit a cigarette and watched darkness fall over the mountain. He couldn't help Heather. She had to find out for herself that she was the only one who could live her life. That knowledge squeezed his heart painfully, but it couldn't touch the thrumming love he felt for her. Sometimes loving meant stepping back to let people live their own lives, complete with mistakes.
A huge swell of regret filled his lungs. It was the same old story: something so good wrapped in something so bad—the strange pattern of his life. He should have known to be suspicious of his seemingly wondrous fortune; should have kept his heart out of the whole thing.
But even as he thought it, he knew it would have been impossible. For Heather was the woman of his dreams, in spite of the insecurities that kept her clinging to a grief that should have been put to rest ages ago. She was a woman capable of great emotion, capable of expressing those emotions—through her music if nowhere else—and capable, too, of nurturing; a woman capable of accepting and reveling in the deep passion he'd conceived for her, a passion that would last until the end of his days.
A huge well of unexpressed feeling pushed at his chest. There was one way to expel it if he wasn't going to drown in a bottle. He stubbed out his cigarette and went to his office. A little girl had a story to finish.
* * *
The graveyard depressed Heather—doubly so with the bitterly cold weather that had settled in overnight. It was an obligatory visit. She felt nothing at all when she laid the wreath of flowers on James's grave with the others that had been placed there yesterday. The right day. What must Mike and his mother have thought of her?
She'd canceled all her classes and appointments for the day. For one, her head ached and her eyes were swollen. Even her neck was stiff from a virulent cold that had set in as she'd fitfully tossed and turned through the night. She knew it was stress, but that didn't make it any easier to b
ear. It had taken every bit of her strength to get dressed, buy the flowers and drive to the graveyard. Now she had to trade Ben's car for her own, which she'd left at the arts center the night he'd picked her up.
The weather matched her grim mood. None of the enchanting snowflakes that had created such a magical mood in the forest yesterday fell now. A pewter-colored sky grayed the old buildings downtown, and traffic had dirtied the snow along the sides of the streets. Even the sight of the steel mill—its rounded fingers reaching into the sky with dark symmetry—didn't cheer her. She thought of the day three years ago when she'd finished her composition instead of the thrill of the audience's ardent response to it Saturday night.
She left Ben's car at the center and drove to Mike's house, hoping to find him home for lunch. Although she knew where his shop was located, she hated to bother him there, and there was no guarantee of the kinds of comments his men would make. She was absolutely not in a state of mind to be gracious about lewd remarks.
Ellen, dressed in a flowing blouse and worn jeans, answered the door. "Hi, Heather. You look awful."
Heather frowned and followed Ellen in. "Thank you very much. Is your husband here?"
"You don't sound very good, either. Come on in the kitchen and let me make you a cup of tea. Mike should be here any time."
In the kitchen Ellen bustled about, putting water on for tea. "I guess you must feel pretty good about yourself, eh?" she asked.
"Frankly," Heather replied, "I've got such a rotten cold, the whole world looks like a mine shaft at the moment."
Ellen gave her a motherly look and pressed a hand to Heather's forehead. "No fever, but your eyes are red." Her wide blue eyes narrowed. "Did you spend the night crying or something? I know it was James's anniversary yesterday."
"No, I didn't cry." She'd been too miserable for tears. They never seemed to help anything, anyway. "I'm just stressed out, I guess. I never get sick unless I am."