Dragonfly

by Farris, John

  She grabbed his wrist. "You said you weren't going to let me out of your sight from now on! I know you didn't mean forever, but just tonight, tonight, please."

  Her expression was tough and obstinate, but the hysteria that gave her strength was about to spew from the pressure cooker of her emotions. He sighed and closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers, willing her to be calm.

  "Okay. Tonight is six hours long. I'll catch some sleep, at dawn we're on our way, and you don't have any more to say about it. Deal?"

  "I'll think it over."

  "Comes the dawn, I'm loading you into the van whether you like it or not."

  "I'll scream all the way. We'll have state troopers strung out behind us for a mile. Roadblocks. They'll lock you up for kidnapping. Don't think I won't press charges."

  He looked fierce without being angry. "You can't bully me, Abby, like you do the rest of the family."

  "We'll see," she said confidently, her cheeks scarlet from the verbal punch-out.

  Joe brought two mattresses from the second floor while Abby was using the downstairs bathroom. He spread sheets and added blankets. When Rolling Thunder reappeared Abby looked approvingly at the arrangements, and looked at Joe. She was wearing a white terry bathrobe with blue trim over a Duke T-shirt and what she called her "puddle pants."

  He lifted her from the wheelchair and positioned her on her right side, a small pillow for her head, pillows at other pressure points. She didn't give directions.He was gentle and a little awkward, as he might be with an infant. He should have children, she thought. He would be good with children. She wondered why some woman hadn't already marched him to the altar, at gunpoint if necessary. Her good fortune that it hadn't happened.

  Joe silently covered Abby with a blanket and lay down facing her, close enough to feel her breath, lightly scented with mint toothpaste, on his face. She asked him for a hand to hold. His eyes closed in thirty seconds.

  "See? I always win," Abby murmured.

  His face was everything to her, more fascinating than the ancient suns that filled the black of night. If it came to that, in the very near future, she wanted to take his image with her, complete in every detail, for all eternity. She believed in some sort of continuation, a resting place for the soul out of the cumbersome body, like a tree in a meadow where no storms come. Hopkins? A long time since she had read the good English poets. Too involved in her own work, which now did not seem of great importance. She had forgotten how to breathe; it would happen again. Her lips were often cold, but they were tingling now: a recurring symptom of something-or-other. Assassins of the heart were everywhere, drifting homeward in the final season of her blood. She felt a heavy, serpentlike stirring of terror that she suppressed by kissing his hand. The only happiness greater than this would be to touch his naked body, to caress him, to be caressed in return.

  His lips had parted in sleep. She watched a slowly swelling bubble of saliva at one corner of his finely chiseled mouth, where the chisel had slipped and left an errant mark. All men possess in their bodies a poison which acts upon serpents; and the human saliva, it is said, makes them take flight as though they had been touched with boiling water. The bubble burst when she nudged it with her little finger. She put the finger in her mouth and sucked. A little saliva for the serpent. Abby left the finger there, nursing. She listened to the sound of the sea. She was barely aware of her slowed and regular breathing, of her own eyes closing contentedly. "Love you," she whispered. "G'night."

  Paul Huskisson was an athletic boy of twenty-two, in his first year of law school at the University of South Carolina. His hair, already beginning to recede, was the color of the blush on a peach. He had shy brown eyes but the sturdy outthrust chin of a born competitor.

  The night they were both grievously injured, he was home from Columbia for the weekend, Abby had not yet left to begin her second year at the University of Virginia. The Huskisson house on Bay Street in Beau-fort's Historic District was being repainted, and the rest of his family was at their summer house on Hunting Island. Paul had taken a room at the Holiday Inn. They had agreed, without actually having a discussion about it, that she was going to spend the night with him there.

  A storm was threatening when they left the garden party at the home of Abby's best friend from high school, soon to be a bride. It was not quite dark, the sky kingfisher blue, and in the west, solitary, the evening star. The storm was coming from the other direction, off St. Helena's Sound. Thunderheads solid as cathedrals, the peaks and domes still lighted by the sun, seething gold and royal purple. The wind was picking up along Pinckney Street, also part of the Historic District, beginning to move the dense crowns of old liveoaks. The air beneath the trees was heavier, summery, flavored with jasmine and roses and the breathy murk of the nearby river. Lightning struck from the darkest clouds like fangs in a snake pit. The enough time for them to walk seven blocks to the Holiday Inn without getting drenched in a sweeping downpour.

  Abby's mood couldn't be called ambivalent. So many different moods flashed through her like the distant lightning: she was giddy and apprehensive, eager to make love but not certain she wouldn't chicken out or otherwise spoil it for him; stunned by the responsibility of pleasing Paul while assuming a commitment that couldn't be fulfilled for at least two years. She had drunk champagne at the party, and eaten crab cakes. Already she had a rumbling stomach. He had kissed her breasts on several occasions, but what would it be like, fully naked in bed with him? The thought gave her goose bumps, and put heat in her groin. She sensed just how concerned he was. Maybe it was the wrong night, maybe they weren't fully ready for each other, but it was going to happen.

  They were walking down the middle of the street, moving to the side whenever a car came by. Some high-school kids in a flamed, Hawaiian-orchid street rod cruised by and made semi-gross remarks which she almost answered with the finger. But two of them crammed into the topless snarling coupe were the younger brothers of Abby's friend Diane Persons. They knew not to go too far with their adolescent taunting. The wind began to swoosh through the big trees as they approached King Street. Abby and Paul were talking about the behavior of friends at the party: who was drinking too much, which bridesmaids-to-be had developed crushes on the groom's attendants. They held damp hands, bumping together companionably as they walked. Abby wore a chiffon party dress and a hat with a big brim. Her straw handbag, with her nightgown and other essentials tucked away in the bottom, was in her free hand. She accused Paul of directing admiring glances at a demure dark beauty who had earned a colossal reputation at Beaufort High. Three broken engagements already, and she hadn't given back any of the rings. In the old days, Abby said judgmentally, she would have poisoned husbands for a living.

  The closer they came to the Holiday Inn, the clumsier and more incompetent Abby felt. She stepped on Paul's foot, almost tripping herself. Her cheeks burned. Paul smiled and wanted to smell her breath. Abby pushed him away, not entirely a good-natured push.

  The wind gusted and her big hat blew off. She whirled in exasperation. The hat had sailed against a wrought-iron fence in front of the Timyard house.

  Abby looked around; Paul was laughing, making no attempt to retrieve her hat for her. Don't be a goof, she said furiously. The wind was turning her hair into a mare's nest. Would you get my hat for me, please? He shook his head. I want to see if you can walk that far in a straight line, he said. I am not drunk, she said. How did this get started, anyway? You said I wasn't faithful to you, Paul answered, still smiling, but glumly.

  There was a moment when they looked at each other and it seemed as if they might have a real quarrel brewing and it would be all over with them before it had truly begun.

  Her heart cringed at the thought; no, not what she wanted. She loved him, she loved him. Time to give in. Abby walked deliberately to the fence, where her beribboned hat with the wide brim trembled, pinned there by the wind. She heard the rumble of a powerful engine behind her, coming out of nowhere, and
almost looked around; but she knew it was Jimmy Persons in his show-off car again, and she wasn't going to give any of them the satisfaction of knowing they were annoying her.

  The hat crept up the fence and blew over the iron spikes before she could get to it. A clap of thunder almost obscured the noise of the car's engine, and the sound of Paul's laughter at her predicament. God damn that stupid hat, on its way to the lily pond in the side yard. Now what was she supposed to do?

  She stood with hands on hips by the six-foot-high fence, annoyed by nearly everything, but particularly by the accelerating growl of the engine in the car coming up the Street.

  And, inspired by a sense of foreboding—Jimmy was going too fast on that narrow Street, didn't he have better sense?—she started to turn her head.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Paul flying toward her from the front of a black truck with a long, high hood and no headlights showing. There was no sound of impact. It was as if he had taken a running start and gone off a springboard and had his arms out stretched to tackle her. And just as all this registered and her muscles began to tense the top of his skull hit her like a rusty cannonball in the lower back, lifted her off her feet and out of her lemon-yellow Capezios, drove her into the fence with such force both collarbones were shattered and her left shoulder was broken. Her head was torn open at the hairline by one of the blunt black spikes that crowned the fence, and her skull was fractured.

  In spite of Abby's injuries, it was a long time before she lost consciousness. And she wasn't aware, until the medics arrived, that she was on her knees with Paul's body lying across her lower legs, a weight that held herupright and slightly angled against the fence. By then rain was beating down but still there was so much blood in her eyes she could only see blurs of lights and moving shadows. She had swallowed blood from her scalp laceration, her lips were glued and her tongue was thick with it. She had stopped screaming but she wanted to scream, once more, so loudly that Paul would have to hear her, and wake up, wake up...

  When Joe sat up with a start, he saw that Abby was no longer on the mattresses with him.

  Rolling Thunder was right there, its small Confederate flag drooping, but Abby wasn't in her wheelchair either.

  He got up slowly, looking around.

  The first floor of the beach house was, except for the bathroom, open space, with no partitions between the living room and the kitchen and dining area. The bathroom door stood open. Moonlight through the salt-glazed porch windows illuminated every corner. Abby was gone.

  Joe rubbed the sleep-blur from his eyes. Panic touched his breas'tbone like a claw.

  "Abby!"

  Not that he expected a response; the house felt empty to him. He looked at the front door. It had been closed, but not locked. Now it was half open.

  He cupped a hand around the dial of his wrist watch to read the time. Twenty after two. The hair on his forearm rose as if he had been magnetized. She had dragged herself outside, somehow without waking him, as quiet and methodical as a turtle, dragged herself across the porch and down to the waves of the sea.

  Barefoot, Joe ran out of the beach house, his heart firing like a shotgun at the full moon.

  Down to the sea, but not in. Seventy yards from the house Abby lay on her back at the foam line of the retreating tide, white-robed, like a sleeping pilgrim. One knee drawn up. Her left hand flung out, as if she had fallen a long way out of the sky to drift downward, weightlessly, the last few crucial feet, landing with no discernible impact.

  He couldn't be sure that she wasn't dead until he bent over her, lifting her head and drenched hair from the depression made by the swirling shallow waters around her. Sand in her left ear, grains of sand on her blue lips. The outstretched left hand and forearm were half-buried. A small yellow crab scuttled out of a fold of her soggy robe. Her nipples beneath the transparent T-shirt were like the pupils of dilated eyes.

  Her heart was beating; she breathed through parted lips. He shook her and she gasped, swallowed hard.

  "Paul."

  "Abby, it's Joe."

  He brushed the sand from her lips. She moved her head, wincing, and looked up at him. The blankness of the moon.

  "Wha—" The sea shuffling in and out. A chill went through her upper body. Her teeth began to chatter.

  "Where—?"

  "You're on the beach. I'm taking you back to the house."

  She was a load to lift, from her dead cold weight and the added weight of the soaked terry robe. Kneeling, he stripped it off her. Half-naked, she shuddered violently again, her gaze wandering. What had taken her to the edge of the sea? Maybe she'd been looking for her black cat bone.

  "S-saw it," she said, with a convulsive jerk of her head, the words spurting out of her like something half-swallowed. "Was here."

  Joe worked the wet T-shirt off her body, exchanging it for the long-sleeved striped rugby shirt he'd been wearing.

  "Saw what?"

  "The truck. H-hit Paul. Was here. Oh, God! Him t-too."

  "Who, Abby?"

  "The driver. He was h-here." She raised her right hand, pointed limply. "Standing over there. W-watching me. That's w-when I f-fell down."

  "You did what?"

  "F-f-f—"

  "You mean you were standing up?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Abby, you were dreaming."

  "N-no. I w-w-walked."

  "From the house?"

  "D-don't know—how f-f-far."

  Joe looked at the packed sand nearby, from which the tide had receded. Even by moonlight he could make out the imprint of quarter-inch-deep footprints, intaglios from her small bare feet.

  "What the hell?"

  "So c-c-cold," she complained. "Help me."

  Joe picked Abby up in his arms, still looking at the small footprints. There was no strength in the arm that hung around his neck, and although she was racked by shudders her legs were immobile. In the drier sand above the high-tide line it was not possible to distinguish other footprints. Nor could he locate what would have been the obvious trail made by her efforts in dragging half of her body across the beach.

  The mystery of it had him trembling too, his own chill enhanced by the cold weight he carried back to the beach house, staggering at every other step in the deep sand on the sloping beach.

  Through the sounds of his own heavy breathing he heard something coming out of sight on the narrow road on the other side of the dune and behind the house, its peaked roof a shade darker than the nighttime gray of the moon-luminous sky. The upper windows that faced the sea had a pearly sheen. So did the eyes of Pamela Abelard, gazing up at him with a drowned lack of expression.

  "Poor P-Paul," she said. "P-Paul is dead."

  He wanted to keep her talking. "You said a truck hit Paul. What kind of truck was it?"

  "Old pickup. Black. The same one I saw... tonight. It came back. Why?"

  At the top of the dune, near the boardwalk and long wheelchair ramp, the lights of another truck bouncing along the track from the direction of the Barony flashed in his eyes: half a dozen lights, including four mounted above the cab of the truck. He turned away. The truck stopped beside his rented Jeep. Joe started up the ramp to the house.

  "No! Bring her to me!" Lucas Thomason called.

  Joe stopped; Abby stirred in his arms.

  "Is that Luke?" she asked weakly.

  "Yes."

  "Why… is he here?"

  "I don't know. I didn't call him."

  Thomason ran up the boardwalk, black against the explosive glare of truck lights.

  "What happened? Is she all right?" He came up to them, the laces of his untied sneakers flopping. His thinning hair was feathery, uncombed, his triangular eyes still puffy from sleep. He put a hand on the side of Abby's throat, staring at her face.

  "Luke," she said, "d-don't be mad." Her teeth chattered again.

  "Hypothermia," he said. "Let me have her, and get a blanket from the house. Bring it to the truck."

  Joe hande
d Abby over to him and jogged into the house. He pulled the blanket off the makeshift bed and took it down to the road. Abby was slumped on the passenger side of the cab, chattering as if she were seated on a block of ice, some saliva on her lower lip. Her expression was dangerously dull. She tried to form words. He wrapped her securely in the blanket as Thomason got in behind the wheel of the Dodge truck.

  "How long was she in the water?" he asked Joe.

  "I don't know. I was asleep."

  "Asleep? How in hell did she get down to the beach?"

  "She says she walked."

  Thomason gave him a look of scornful antagonism. "That's not very funny. I won't be needing your help any more tonight."

  "She belongs in a hospital," Joe said.

  "I'll decide that."

  "Doctor, you could lose Abby."

  "Thanks to your complete lack of judgment and negligence in caring for her. Is it too much to hope I won't be seeing you again? Good night, Dr. Bryce."

  Abby stuttered something unintelligible. Her eyes appealed to Joe.

  Thomason hit the gas and backed up, wheels spinning, throwing out a torrent of sand and shell. Joe had to turn away to shield his eyes; his naked back stung from bits of sharp shell. The Dodge truck headed back to the Barony.

  Joe watched it go, still trembling, but fiery inside from anger and the knowledge that in truth he had not done a very good job of taking care of Abby. In spite of the fact that something extraordinary seemed to have happened to her. He could only hope that she would get through the rest of the night with Thomason at her side. In four or five hours, when he'd had time to think and to explore the beach at sunrise, it would be his turn.

  In the beach house he boiled water for tea on the stove, turned on the television. Hurricane Honey had moved north instead of hitting Nassau, and now was two hundred fifty miles southwest of Bermuda. The red eye of the satellite imager, the center of the storm now rated as Category Three, was irregular, shaped very much like the hourglass on the underside of a black widow spider deep in its web.