Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  8

  Jane awoke suddenly in the darkness. Her hands could feel the stitched outlines of the flowers on the quilted bedspread her mother had made. She was puzzled. It took her a moment to remember why she was in Deganawida, sleeping fully dressed. She could tell that her mind had been struggling with something in the darkness, but whatever it was, she had not been able to bring it back with her this time. There was a sound still in the air, maybe left over from the dream, and then she heard it again: the ring of the doorbell.

  She stepped to the window and looked down at the front steps. She could see the faint glow of the porch light on Carey McKinnon’s high forehead. He was carrying a big brown shopping bag. She hurried to the mirror, turned on the light, brushed her hair quickly, then rushed into the bathroom and reached for the handle of her makeup drawer, but the ring came again. She had no time.

  She came down the stairs, crossed the living room, and swung the door open. She stayed back out of the reach of the bright light on the porch and said, “Oh, too bad. I was hoping it was Special Delivery.”

  “No, you weren’t,” said Carey. “They don’t come at eleven o’clock at night. I happened to be passing by on the way home from work, and I saw your car was back.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said. “Deganawida is north of the hospital. Amherst is due east.”

  “I had to stop near here to buy myself these flowers.” He opened the bag and held up a dozen white roses. “Since you’re up anyway, could you do me a favor and put them someplace?”

  “Oh, all right.” She reached out and took them. “I suppose you’d better come in while I do it. I don’t want you scaring Mrs. Oshinski’s Dobermans.”

  He stepped in and closed the door behind him. She knew she had imagined he had ducked to come through the doorway; he had just looked down to plant his feet on the mat. But he had always given the impression that he was a big boy and still growing, and it had never gone away, ten years after college, when his sandy hair was already thinning a little at the crown.

  He followed her into the kitchen. “So how was your trip?”

  “Who said I was on a trip?”

  “Oh. Then how did your car like its month in the shop?”

  “I was on a trip,” she conceded. “California. It’s pretty much as advertised.”

  He nodded. “Warm.”

  “Yeah. What’s a doctor doing coming home this late? House calls?”

  “Dream on. I’m working the emergency room. Night is the time when roads get slippery, fevers go up, people clean loaded guns.”

  Jane snipped the stems of the roses and skillfully arranged them in a cloisonné vase that had been her grandmother’s, then placed the vase on the dining room table.

  “Beautiful,” said Carey. “Good place for them, too.”

  “They’re right where you won’t forget them when you leave.”

  “No, you might as well keep them. They’re all wet.” He pretended to fold up his shopping bag. “Oh, I forgot. They gave me this too.” He held up a bottle of champagne. “Two-for-one sale or something. I couldn’t understand the lady in the store. Thick Polish accent.”

  “Your mother was Polish.”

  “Was she? I couldn’t understand her either.” He walked to the sink, popped the cork on the champagne, and plucked two glasses out of the cupboard. “Explains a lot. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me. Nice woman, though.”

  Jane had to step into the light to take her glass. Carey clinked it gently with his, then followed her into the living room.

  “So why are you working the emergency room?” she asked as she curled her legs under her on the couch. “Finally piss somebody off?”

  A change came into his voice as it always did when he talked about his work. “I decided I needed a refresher course, so I took over the evening shift a couple of weeks ago. If Jake asks, I’ve still got plenty of time to check my regular patients for suspicious moles.”

  “Why does a young quack like you need a refresher course? Doze off in medical school?”

  “I guess I should have said ‘a reminder course.’ It’s basic medicine. The door at the end of the hall slides open, and in walks Death. You get to look him in the eye, spin him around, and kick his ass for him. It’s exhilarating.

  Besides, the regular guy asked me to help him out. E.R. doctors last about as long as the average test pilot, and he’s approaching the crash-and-burn stage. They don’t always win.” He seemed to notice her listening to him. “You look awful, by the way.”

  “Sweet of you to say so. That’s how women look when you wake them up.”

  He turned his head to the left to call to an invisible person. “Nurse! More light!” Her eyes involuntarily followed his voice, and he turned on the lamp above him with his right. “Wow. Pretty good contusions and abrasions. Finally piss somebody off?”

  She knew she wasn’t going to get the car accident story past Dr. Carey McKinnon. “I was mugged outside my hotel.”

  “I’m sorry, Jane.” he said, tilting his head to see her more clearly. “What happened?”

  “It was nothing, really. He came out from behind one of those pillars in the garage under the hotel to grab my purse. I yelled and the parking attendant came. He got away.”

  “Is he all right?”

  She frowned. “Why would anybody say that?”

  “Your hands.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I did resist a little. I’m not dumb enough to die for a purse, but he scared me.”

  Carey was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I left my bag in the car. I always have one with me in case there’s a chance to bill somebody.”

  “You’re a dear friend, but I like you because your big feet tromp my snow down in the winter so I can get my car out. Who said I wanted medical treatment from you?”

  “I just need to bring it in. Old Jake probably recognized my car, and he’s handy enough to break in for the drugs.”

  Carey stepped outside. She heard his trunk slam, and then his feet coming back up on the porch. In a moment he was inside, the black bag was open at her feet, and he was sitting beside her turning her head gently from side to side. He took a bottle out of his bag and poured something out of it onto a ball of cotton. He swabbed her face with the cold liquid and then stared into her eyes with a little flashlight. He took her hands in his and studied them, then bent her wrists a couple of times, staring as though he could see through to her bones.

  “Doctor?” she said. “Just tell me, will I be able to play the piano?”

  “Heard it. You couldn’t before.” He didn’t smile. “The wrist is only a mild sprain,” he said. “It’ll be okay in a few days. The lacerations on the knuckles look good already – probably because you didn’t put makeup on them. You’re lucky. Human teeth are an incredible source of infection.” He took a small aerosol can out of the bag and sprayed her hands. It felt colder than the disinfectant, but as it dried, the pain seemed to go away. He lifted her hand and kissed the fingertips. “I just like the taste of that stuff.” He looked at her cheerfully. “You want to know the truth, it helps things heal. We don’t tell people that, of course.”

  Jane couldn’t think of a retort. In all of the twelve or thirteen years she had known Carey McKinnon, they had been buddies. They had kissed hello and goodbye, but he had been the friend she could call so she didn’t have to go to a movie alone or eat at a table for one. The champagne was a pleasant surprise, but the roses brought with them a new ambiguity, and it was growing and getting more confusing.

  “Stand up,” he said. She stood up. He moved her arms and felt the elbows, pressed the radius and ulna between his fingers. He put his big hand under her rib cage and poked her a couple of times with the other. “Does that hurt?”

  “Uh! Of course it hurts. Cut it out,” she said. At another time she would have poked him back, but now he was being a doctor – at least she thought
he was.

  “Your liver didn’t pop loose, anyway,” he said. “You can have champagne without fear of death.”

  “Oh?” she said. “How long have I got?”

  “What do I care?” He sipped his champagne. “I’ll have been dead for twenty years. You pamper yourself like a racehorse, and women handle the wear and tear better than men.” His eyes swept up and down her body with a frankness that she wasn’t positive was detachment. “It’s just a better machine.”

  “Then you must really be walking around in a piece of junk,” she said. She stretched her sore arms and rubbed her shoulders.

  “That’s only muscle pain,” he said.

  “Well, don’t sound disappointed. It’s the best pain I can manage right now.”

  “A big shot of adrenaline comes in and your muscles go from rest to overperformance in a second or two, and they feel the strain. In two days you’ll be back out there teaching truck drivers to arm wrestle, or whatever it is you do.”

  “Consulting.”

  “Insulting them – whatever,” he said. He started to close his bag, but then spotted something. He picked up a clear bottle with a liquid in it that looked like vinegar. “Try this stuff.”

  “What is it?”

  He handed it to her. “Don’t look free samples in the mouth. Doctors get an incredible number of them, and once in a while you get something you can give your friends legally. This stuff is terrific.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It’s not medicine. It’s just glorified massage oil. It’s got a very mild analgesic in it, so it puts a deep warmth on sore muscles.”

  Jane opened the bottle and sniffed it. “You’re not lying, anyway. It smells too good to be medicine.”

  He took it back. “Come on,” he said. “Lie down and I’ll put some on you.”

  “Lie down, Carey?” she asked. “Could you be a little more specific, please? Or maybe less specific?”

  “I assure you, madam, I am a qualified physician. Board-certified. Climb up there on the board.” He pointed to the dining room table.

  She walked uncertainly in that direction and stared at the table skeptically. “The table? Are you sure?”

  “Well, if I asked you to lie down on your bed, would you do it?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Then she wondered how much she had actually meant by that. If it wasn’t what she was afraid it was, why had she hesitated?

  He said, “Okay, if it’s not occupied, let’s use it.” He walked to the stairs.

  Jane took a big gulp of her champagne. They had been friends for so long that the possibility of a sudden change was unsettling. She didn’t want to lose him. She picked up the bottle and followed. “I was thinking about you a few days ago,” she said. “I was talking to a little boy.”

  “Tall or short?”

  “Uh… tall, I guess, for his age. He’s eight.”

  “Tell him surgery, then. Dermatologists are short, as a rule. Surgeons are tall.”

  He stopped at the door of her bedroom, and she edged past him and sat on the bed. She looked up at him. “Are you sure you’re not just trying to get funny with me?”

  Carey sipped his glass of champagne thoughtfully. “It’s crossed my mind. Always does. We never have before, and this may not be the best time to start. I sure don’t want to lose you just because we disagreed on how to go about it. It’s kind of tricky, and you’re a very critical person.”

  “I am not,” she said. “But what if it turned out to be an awful mistake? Would you still be able to call me up when you wanted to go someplace where no respectable person would go with you?”

  “It’s hard to know. How about you? If you needed somebody to make fun of, would it still be me?”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess we should talk about it sometime when we’re not exhausted and the bottle’s still corked.” She flopped onto the bed on her stomach with her arms bent and her hands under her chin. “Right now I need an old friend who’s willing to rub my sore back.”

  He sat on the bed beside her, lifted the sweatshirt a few inches, poured a little of the oil in his hand, and then slowly and gently rubbed it into the small of her back in a circular motion.

  “Ooh,” she sighed. “That’s good.”

  He worked patiently, his strong hands softly kneading the sore muscles in exactly the right spots, working up higher on her back now, to the shoulder blades. She could feel the tight, hard knots of muscle relaxing under his touch. The hands kept moving inward toward the tender muscles along the spine. When he stopped to pour more oil into his palm, Jane pulled the sweatshirt up almost to her shoulders, hesitated, then slipped it up over her head and set it beside her. She was naked to the waist now, but it had seemed that making him work under a shirt was idiotic. If Carey saw her breasts, he saw her breasts.

  His hands were on her shoulders, and then the connecting muscles to her neck and then along the back of her neck to her scalp. She felt goose bumps and shivered, then relaxed again. She was so loose and at ease now that all the muscles on the top half of her body were on the edge of some kind of sleep, a paralysis of laziness, so happy not moving that they didn’t quite belong to her anymore. They were just there waiting for him to touch them again.

  Carey said, “How’s it going so far?”

  “I’m ready to die now,” she announced. “Just give me more champagne and keep rubbing, and you can tell them to pull the trigger whenever.”

  He worked back down her spine, and she began to imagine that she could see him clearly from the position of his hands on her skin. She remembered telling Timmy about him. She had said he was special, and he was. Without warning, the word angel appeared in her mind, and she laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing,” she answered with the smile still in her voice. “You’re being an angel.”

  “How about your legs?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do they hurt?”

  She considered the implications. He couldn’t rub oil on her through a pair of blue jeans. He knew that. “Not at the moment.” When she had said it she felt a sense of loss that she didn’t have the time to analyze if she was going to fix it. “You can’t be too careful, though.” She reached under her stomach to unbutton the jeans and give a tug on the zipper.

  He slipped the jeans down her legs and off her ankles, and she felt tension in her throat. Then his hands were on the soles of her feet, squeezing them with tiny circular movements, until she began to imagine she was feeling him sending messages up the nerves to her shoulders and neck. The tension didn’t go away, but it wasn’t unpleasant anymore. He worked up the Achilles tendon, the calves, and very softly the backs of her knees, and then slowly and carefully up the hamstrings. She was calm and happy, and she wasn’t thinking at all anymore, just following his touch. But then the circular movement of his hand passed for a moment between her thighs and she caught herself arching her back to spread them apart the tiniest bit.

  He kept working on her legs and back, but she could feel that the hands weren’t alternating anymore, so he was undressing with the other. Then she felt the panties being peeled off, and he turned her over to gently kiss her bruised face, and they slowly joined in the embrace that she had always known would come.

  Everything began with a slow inevitability, a luxurious ease and simplicity that made her feel warm, then eager, and then glad. But the feeling didn’t fade. It built and intensified. After that, every second, every heartbeat expanded into a moment of its own. Suddenly she became aware that she was hearing a woman’s voice, and she wondered how long she had been doing that, moaning and making little cries that she couldn’t have silenced if she tried. Then she went beyond thinking into a place where every sensation seemed to go up one notch on the scale to the highest frequency – colors, sounds, movements. She was almost afraid when the intensity kept building, and the word angel came back to her, but this time she didn’t laugh, because eve
rything was bright and fever-clear and immediate, with no distance left at all, no will inside her but his.

  The whole night passed without her knowing the time, because she had the sense that she would have to give up something in order to think. They would pause and let their heartbeats slow, lying together still clasped in the same embrace but not the same now, somehow friends simply passing together into sleep. But then one of them would stir, and the other would silently say yes, each time the question and the answer completely different, because every time the last time had not faded or gone away, so it was like going up another step on a stairway.

  At dawn they were lying on the bed, eyes closed, when he said, “What do you think about getting married?”

  Jane’s breath caught in her throat. Have beautiful tall children. Live here – not in this house, but at least close by, in the big old stone one in Amherst with him. Maybe that was where all of this had been taking her, leading her away from death the way she had taken other people. She would never have to tell him what a guide was because it would all be over – already was over when you started losing.

  “No answer?” he asked.

  “Every girl’s fondest wish,” she said. “Think the guy who owns the Buffalo Bills might be interested in marrying me? Maybe the one who fathered those quintuplets. There’s a guy who knows his way around a diaper.”

  “I mean it,” said Carey. “We should get married.”

  Jane sat up, then leaned over and kissed him, letting her hair hang down on both sides of their faces like a curtain. She lay back down. “Thank you,” she said. “I guess we ought to have a serious talk about it sometime.”

  “Does that mean yes? That’s what you said last night.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ve always loved everything I knew about you.”

  “So why are you saying no?”