by Jane Gentry
Oh, God. Things just seemed to get worse and worse. To have this disaster after the idyllic evening she had spent with Steve was overwhelming. Now she knew she loved him, deeply and dearly, and perhaps for the rest of a lonely, heartbreaking life. Cara and Melody grew more hostile toward each other with every day which passed.
Kalik. Kalik the Destroyer was at work in their lives; every breath they took was a fight against him. How much longer could they last? Before, when she and Steve had talked about it, showing the girls their affection and love for each other seemed sensible and appealing. Now?
She was frightened, she knew, that Cara and Melody would guarantee her a bleak future bereft of the man she loved.
“We’ll talk about it later,” said Elizabeth. The bed squeaked as she rose; the door creaked as she pulled it closed behind her. Have to oil this, she thought, seized by mind-saving irrelevance. Oil all the doors in the house.
Her head ached. Every squeak stabbed at her temples.
She got the afghan off the floor and collapsed on the couch. The room smelled of woodsmoke and the very slight but lingering perfume of sex. She rolled to her side and cuddled one of the couch pillows to her stomach. She did love Steve. She knew it, had known it for some time. She’d been afraid to admit that love, afraid of the malevolent spirits whose joy it is to confound human happiness. Afraid Cara and Melody would drive them irrevocably apart, and she’d spend the rest of her life in helpless longing.
But now she knew that even if the worst came to pass, if for some reason she couldn’t have him, even if they never made love again—she knew that this short, wonderful time spent in his arms had been worth all the pain it was likely to cause.
Chapter Nine
Elizabeth was depressed, and the depression was exhausting. It was just eight-thirty, and she was ready to go to bed. Only the knowledge that she’d have to trudge up the stairs kept her on the couch.
The phone rang six or seven times, quit for a few seconds and started again. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, considering whether she wanted to go to the trouble to answer it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Especially not to Steve.
She wanted him to come over, to take her in his arms and comfort her. And he couldn’t. He had huge responsibilities of his own, responsibilities just like hers. Responsibilities that—if either of them had any sense—would keep her out of his arms forever.
She was afraid if she heard his voice she’d cry.
She glared at the phone on the small table at the end of the couch.
“Shut up, damn you,” she said, nudging it with a toe.
It wouldn’t.
Finally she sat up and grabbed the thing. She lay down again with it on her stomach and listened to it ring twice more before she answered.
“Elizabeth?” said Joe, from the other end of the line. “Is Cara all right?”
Damn it. She didn’t want to hear from Joe.
“Of course,” she said, and she barely kept from snapping. “Two girls wearing the same dress is hardly a disaster.”
“It is, if you’re thirteen,” Joe reminded her.
“I am tired of thirteen,” said Elizabeth.
“You’ll survive it,” he told her. “It’s just a phase.”
Elizabeth thought of Cara at the age of one, flushing a tennis ball down the upstairs toilet. At two, bringing a hose inside to water the houseplants. At three, painting the cut crystal bathroom faucets with red fingernail polish. At six, when she stored eggs, milk and bologna in her toy refrigerator until the smell of them became so horrible that Elizabeth thought a sewer line was broken and called a plumber.
“I’m an expert survivor,” said Elizabeth. “However, what Steve’s sister says about phases is that this, too, will pass, and something worse will come to take its place. So far, all my experience makes me think she’s right.”
“This, too, will pass, and something better will come to take its place,” said Joe kindly. Cara and Mel can’t keep this up forever.
He sounded so—untroubled, Elizabeth thought. So confident. Like a man with no wildlife experience, who thought tigers were cute and would be fun to have as pets.
“Don’t underestimate them,” she said grimly. “They’ll eat you alive.”
“Goodnight, Elizabeth,” he said, with gentle sympathy. “Things will look better in the morning.”
Everybody always said that, thought Elizabeth irritably. As if they were offering some sort of guarantee.
She stared at the ceiling. Falling in love was such a simple process. It happened without effort and with no warning. And forever after, you couldn’t just consider yourself and your love. Other people important to you bombarded you with their own needs and expectations. They had to be handled skillfully, so they wouldn’t be hurt. You spent a lifetime picking your way through an emotional mine field, never knowing what was going to cause an explosion.
A gloomy picture. Ishmael’s November was skulking in her soul. She needed Christmas, with carols and bells and excitement and joy and hope, and it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet.
The phone still squatted on her stomach, and its bell vibrated through her ribs as it rang again. This time it was Robert, who wanted to know if Cara had gotten her birthday package. Elizabeth definitely didn’t want to talk to Robert, that frequent and careless layer of mines.
After she called Cara to the phone, she ran a tub of hot water and immersed herself to her chin.
Kalik the Destroyer was impossibly paralleling her life, and it was horrible. Jord Varic felt exactly as she felt: hopeless, helpless and filled with the fear that she had little chance of success.
She rubbed at her shoulders and told herself the heat would soothe her tight muscles.
Instead, the tension maliciously compressed itself and moved to a particularly vulnerable spot just behind her ears. The heat went wherever heat goes and took its small comfort with it. When the water became uncomfortably tepid, Elizabeth put on her footie jammies, swallowed three aspirin and climbed into bed.
Into the big, cold bed. She could hear Steve saying it, his voice as cold as the icy, white virginal sheets. Sleeping all by herself in the big, cold bed.
She hated it.
* * *
Steve looked in on Melody twice. She had the quilt pulled over her head.
Both times she heard him open the door, and both times she said, “Go away! I want to be alone!” It was an order no less forceful for being muffled by her bedclothes.
He looked at her dress, which was in a heap in the corner, and went downstairs to call Elizabeth, shaking his head all the way.
If two boys, he grumbled to himself, happened to wear the same suit to a dance, they wouldn’t start World War III over it. They probably wouldn’t even notice. When boys showed up identically dressed, they were pleased; it meant they could know they were dressed properly, and it made them feel secure. Girls really were inexplicable. Why would they care who wore what, anyway, as long as both of them looked nice in the damn dress?
The Fairchild phone was busy. He snarled at it impatiently. It had been busy for an hour and a half. Whom would Elizabeth be talking to at this hour? She wouldn’t have called her mother; it was four in the morning in Paris.
She didn’t necessarily have to be talking to Salvini, he told himself—though he knew if he’d been Joe Salvini, he’d have called her. Elizabeth had lived in Philadelphia all her life. She knew dozens of people.
Some of those dozens, including Salvini, were men. And not one of those dozens, including Salvini, was in a war zone. Steve had brooded on the phrase since he’d heard it pass Elizabeth’s lips.
But he and Elizabeth were living in a war zone, and no mistake—unwilling noncombatants enduring life under two generals who never called a cease-fire. He would never give up the hope that Melody and Cara would come to terms. But how long would Elizabeth tolerate battle conditions, when she could end the war by surrendering to Cara’s demands?
Elizabeth was d
istressed now beyond all measure. He wanted badly to go to her and comfort her. To take her in his arms and kiss her and brush the hair away from her face and hold her quietly while she relaxed into slumber. To cuddle her close and provide her with serene, restful, untroubled sleep.
But she was out of reach.
Her phone line was still busy at eleven, at midnight, at one o’clock. Steve had an enraging vision of Salvini, giving Elizabeth the comfort he wanted to give her himself.
At last he went to bed. There was no serene, restful, untroubled sleep for him. He tossed under the covers and listened to a heavy rain rattle against the roof of the house. Unpleasant images chased through his half-sleep and transformed into nightmares whenever he dozed.
The next morning he forced Melody into dress clothes and drove them both to church. She didn’t want to go.
“Everybody will laugh at me,” she sobbed, before she would get out of the car.
“I keep telling you that nobody would have noticed, if you and Cara hadn’t made such a scene,” he said calmly, when what he wanted to do was shout at her. “And nobody cares now. It’s a new day. They have other things to think about.”
“No, they don’t have other things!” she said. “Everybody noticed. And they’ll all laugh at me! I’m not going!”
“Damn it,” Steve muttered. Then, holding out what he thought was bait, he said to Melody, “Here comes Geordie.”
“Oh, no!” she shrieked, and ducked under the dash. “Don’t let him see me!”
Steve felt like gibbering. In the past few months, Melody had become a wild-eyed cross between Greta Garbo and the Red Queen. How long would it go on? He dreadfully missed the nice, funny little girl she’d always been, with her cheerful face and her sunny sense of humor. What if little Miss Hyde had moved in to stay?
So he wanted to marry Elizabeth and have two Hydes in the same house? What a horrible prospect. He could picture them, snarling around corners, stamping up the staircase, slamming doors and hurling insults, which were, as Miss Westcott had said, too various to relate. With that incentive before him, he could stop writing science fiction and start turning out horror stories. There would certainly be plenty of ideas to draw from.
He supposed the years from twelve to eighteen were nature’s way of making sure everybody was glad when the kids left home for college. But was every child consumed by adolescence to such a degree that it depressed paternal immune systems and made their fathers’ hair thin on top? Or was it just Melody? What an awful hypocrite he was, telling Elizabeth how to handle Cara, when he couldn’t do a thing with Melody. He wasn’t ever going to offer any more advice. He wasn’t qualified.
Elizabeth passed in front of his car, huddled with Cara under a huge black umbrella. He tapped on the horn, and she turned and stopped and waited for him. Cara and Melody shot apart like negative particles, unable to bear such close vicinity. Steve and Elizabeth watched them run in different directions through the driving rain to separate church doors.
He turned the umbrella slightly sideways, to shield them from onlookers and kissed her good morning. She held her face up willingly, not disturbed in the slightest by their public environment.
“I’m practicing what you preach,” she said, smiling, when he raised his eyebrows at her. “Public affection.”
“And I was just beginning to despair,” he said, his tension dissolving under her touch. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”
She smoothed her gloved hand across his cheek and left it there while he kissed her again. Then, arm in arm, they went inside to listen to the priest, a learned historian, lecture on the roots of enmity between Araby and Israel.
“Sort of speaks to our situation,” said Steve, over the post-service coffee. “Not quite as bad, though.”
“What happened to they’ll-come-around-I’ll-see-to-it?” asked Elizabeth, who hadn’t had much sleep herself. “I may not be actively despairing right now, but I sure considered it all of last night.”
“That’s not despair,” said Steve. He looked for Cara and Melody, who sulked in separate corners of the room. Geordie, obviously acting on a man’s instinct for danger, was nowhere in sight. “It’s battle fatigue. You need some R and R.”
“Had some yesterday, thanks,” she said. “Can’t see that it dissolved the tribal friction. But—” with a thoroughly delighted grin “—it certainly dissolved a different problem.”
“Friction does have its uses,” he said solemnly. “We’ll have to try it again.”
He ached for her, all the time, in every way—with his body, with his mind, with his heart. He caught a glimpse of Cara passing in front of Melody, her head down, her shoulders stiff, and of Melody, her lips tight and thin and white.
He had learned to love Elizabeth, and it had been an easy lesson. All his happiness was bound up into the future together—and now Kalik the Destroyer had appeared in his life again, with its gnashing teeth and devouring jaws, to tear and swallow the hope of his soul.
Anger and fear pulsed through him. He sublimated them into strengthened resolve. He would wrestle and kill Kalik, kill that monster which hated love and destroyed it; he would vanquish Kalik with perseverance and strategic planning. He could do it. He would do it. The Kalik of his past had been beyond his control—Melody and Cara weren’t.
“It’s not just the sex,” she said. “It’s the love.”
“You need more of both,” he said gently.
“No doubt about that.” Her hand trembled. Coffee dripped onto her beige kid gloves.
“I’d have discussed it with you last night,” said Steve, unable to stop the words from coming from his mouth. “But your phone was busy.”
So he had tried to call. She immediately felt better.
“Joe called, to see if the girls were all right.”
“He didn’t call me,” growled Steve. He took the coffee from her hand and blotted at her glove with a napkin.
“And Robert called, to see if Cara got the package,” she continued. “I could almost see his tan from here.”
He wanted to ask, which one did you talk to for three hours? But he wasn’t quite that crazed by jealousy yet. He looked at Elizabeth, slender and beautiful in an English tweed suit, and wondered how long it would take him to get to that humiliating point.
He was a patient man. He knew that. Patience was made up of self-control and steely determination. Controlled anger. Controlled fear. Controlled movement, thought and action. He’d learned that as a schoolboy playing football and refined it in the Navy, as a Seabee, doing things so dangerous that impatience could send you to an early grave. He could be patient with Melody’s hysteria, with Cara’s hostility and with Elizabeth’s anxiety.
He could be patient. And, he thought, glancing at the old cherrywood altar framed by the open sanctuary doors, he could ask for help.
“Want to spend Thanksgiving with Melody and me?” he asked, considering how to calm the hurricane by Thursday.
Elizabeth looked at him with longing in her eyes. “I’d adore to. And Lin has already asked.”
“I thought just the four of us.”
Elizabeth actually laughed out loud. “You, me, Melody, Cara, Kalik and poor Sammy cowering in his chair with his paws over his eyes.”
So she’d been thinking along the same lines.
“Kalik,” he said, with a good deal more certainty than he felt, “can be vanquished.”
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “I hope so. I told Lin not to buy a big turkey, though. The girls will spoil my appetite.”
“That’s good. The girls will be too busy glaring at each other to eat at all,” he said. “And I’m really not that crazy about turkey.”
They laughed, but it wasn’t really funny.
Elizabeth said, “As much as I hate to leave, I have to go home. I’m helping a client set up a new accounting system tomorrow, and I’m going to have to work for the rest of the day and most of the night to customize the software.”
> “Sounds imposing,” said Steve, who customized his own software by calling a technician.
“Is imposing,” she said. “Also fun.”
“Better you than me,” said Steve, smiling at her.
“Well, I’d hate to have to write a book,” she said. “Even an ABC book. I don’t see how you do it.”
“You know, you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me,” he told her. “Usually they inform me that they could write something much more profound than mere science fiction, if they just had the time.”
She tilted her head bewitchingly. “Oh, come on. Is that really true?”
“Yeah, and then they tell me that since they don’t have time, they’ll just give me their idea and I can write it and they’ll let me have half the profit.”
“What do you say?” asked Elizabeth, much amused.
“I tell ‘em my mind’s not sufficiently developed to be able to handle such complicated material,” he said. “Then I trot right off to the nearest bar, buy a stiff drink and admire their guts.”
“I’ve read through The Lion’s Whelp,“ she told him. “It’s very thought provoking.”
“I was so unsure of myself as a parent when I wrote that,” Steve said. “Used to be, I thought I knew everything, and now I find that I don’t know anything at all.”
“I’d laugh at that, if it weren’t so true.” She glanced around her. All quiet. “I read Kalik the Destroyer a few days ago. It was hard to finish. It’s frightening.”
“I wrote that as my marriage was breaking up. My entire world was breaking up with it. Sure a change from jaunty Jord in the first book. He knew everything. I’ve often envied him.”
“Are all your books autobiographical?”
“Well,” said Steve, shaking his head doubtfully. “I don’t intend for them to be, but a lot of the time, it works out that way. Jord seems to be, more than most.”
From across the room, where the kids were congregated, came a burst of laughter. Cara, who was standing to the side, fled through the vestry and into the churchyard. Melody came to her father with her face flaming.
“I want to go,” she said. “Right now.”