The waves were higher than the lack of wind would indicate, and Angie let out a wild laugh as the bottom inch of her shorts was instantly soaked. She shouted at him as she ran back across the wet sand, “The water’s warm!”
Colin said nothing. As she got closer she saw that tears were running down his face. She held him gently at first, but as he sobbed, he collapsed more fully into her arms and her grip grew tighter.
Colin was wretchedly aware of her body. The closeness of it. How strongly she held him. His own arms circled her waist and he pulled her closer. He wanted to kiss her almost as much as he wanted to be held and to keep on crying.
The conflicting emotions were wonderful.
“I miss her,” he finally whispered into her ear. He pulled away and tried to point to the tidemark on Angie’s shorts. As he did, he forced himself to smile. “She would have done the very same thing.”
She grinned. “I did say you can grieve and date.”
They shared sandwiches with the less-than-patient birds, and both their feathered friends and the courting/mourning couple ate in silence.
He drove Angie home from the beach later in the afternoon. The rain had grown stronger, and the temperature had dropped. No one else joined them by the waterfront, and even the gulls had abandoned them after confirming that all the edibles in Colin’s bag were gone.
Colin felt foolish. He had cried for a long time, and this was clearly not the ideal way to comport oneself on a second date. Of course, he had not been on a second date, or any other kind of date, for a long time, but he was still fairly certain that extended blubbering was not the recommended route.
However, in many ways he felt better. It was clear that he had needed a good cry, and he had certainly enjoyed holding Angie.
He looked over at Angie as he pulled up at her house. “I’m sorry.”
She smiled as she typed. “Don’t be. Text me when you want to go out again.”
“When should I do that?”
“Soon.” She didn’t stop texting. She was still smiling. “Text me very soon.”
He waited until she was inside before he drove away.
Later that evening, Colin again flaunted his cavalier new attitude toward money.
He had noted several places on the Natural Boundary Foundation website where donations could be made. He positioned his cursor over the first one he found. As he pulled his credit card from his wallet, he considered the amount he would give. A dollar would be too small. A million would be too large. There was certainly a lot of room in between. He was curious to see what, if any, response he would receive. This was lost money. There was no tax deduction to be had. If the NBF was legitimate, he was giving his money to a place that may well deserve it. If it wasn’t …
Angie might have stirred the pot with her credit check, whereas a donation seemed less provocative. And perhaps the response would tell him something about the foundation that he didn’t already know.
Five boxes, marked 10 dollars, 100 dollars, 1,000 dollars, 10,000 dollars, and other. Colin went straight for the middle box and clicked.
He hadn’t needed his credit card, as his laptop stored a copy of all the relevant information. The transaction was over in seconds. In an instant, he received an automated thank you. He would be interested to see if a more personal reply followed.
Next, Colin called the airline he had flown home on and spoke to a customer service representative. He told her how much he had enjoyed flying first class and she thanked him. He asked if it would be possible to enroll in the rewards program permanently. He was once again thanked. After that there was a pause in the conversation. Before he was put on hold, Colin could hear a computer keyboard begin to pitter-patter in the background.
His creditworthiness was doubtlessly being assessed. He thought briefly of Angie’s unexpected inquiry.
Colin Tugdale had a lot of money. But did he have enough money?
As he waited, it occurred to him that the brevity of his remaining lifespan would work in his favor here. He could easily afford to fly first class because, after all, he was only going to be flying first class for a year or so. And after that, he wasn’t going to be flying anywhere. As if to confirm this, the representative was back, and she had some good news for Colin.
He would get his rewards card in the next few days, and he was given a temporary four-digit access code.
The numbers were an unremarkable six-two-six-one, which he dutifully wrote down.
He was asked if he wanted to book a flight tonight. He declined. When he asked her what his rewards status would cost, he was quoted a figure considerably higher than he had imagined. He hesitated for a moment. But only for a moment.
He even remembered to thank her as he hung up.
Colin was absurdly pleased with himself. His next year of flying would be in the lap of luxury. He had just spent a great deal of money, and he didn’t care. Tomorrow, he would be driving out to the airport for some overpriced pampering and amateur sleuthing.
Ruby had told him to try something new. He felt that, in many ways, he very definitely was.
He would need to get his rest first.
No ballgame that night, and the gods of sleep and/or baseball smiled down.
Colin Tugdale was dreaming. He knew it, even as he dreamed.
The three rooms in the large house lay far apart. The house itself was an old manor house. He was somewhere in England. Or, at least, he was somewhere in a stylized Masterpiece Theatre version of England. The house stood austere and Georgian on a hill, high above a significant acreage of land. Yet the land wasn’t all attendant to the manor. There was working farmland. There was also a neglected greenhouse, with cracked and broken windows that threatened the existence of the non-native plants huddled inside. He was aware that there were pretty, moss-draped, thatch-roofed cottages further away, with well-tended squares of garden allotments, and there were nameless peasants who tended the allotments, or were in service up at the manor, or who free held in the wheat fields that Colin instinctively knew were a portion of the manor lands.
Had the concept of freeholding ever factored into one of his dreams before? Colin thought not.
And yet he, Colin Tugdale, a commoner of little import, was attending a party in the manor house. He wore, implausibly, a tweed jacket. He also sported a white shirt and a red plaid tie. He held a full glass in his hand. He hadn’t drunk any of it, although he thought it might be sherry. He was surrounded by people, men and women to whom he was pointedly not talking. Men and women, it should be said, who were equally pointedly not talking to him.
Colin was in the first of three rooms.
The manor house presumably had many other rooms, but they were irrelevant to his dream’s narrative. The three rooms were high-ceilinged, with plaster walls crumbling elegantly, hung with oil paintings depicting stiff-backed earls a-hunting on horseback and beagles a-beagling in ritualized hunt scenes. Somewhere at the periphery of the stylized motif lurked the requisite lowly fox, no doubt a-paralyzed with fear.
In the second room, his dead wife Ruby stood surrounded by other women. She was replete with a collection of blood-red jewels and an elegant powder blue floor-length dress, an ensemble she would never have countenanced in real life. All the women in the room were clad in similar garb.
In the third room stood Angie Rennie. She struck quite the figure, in cream-colored jodhpurs, knee-high black leather riding boots spit-polished to a high sheen, and a tight black jacket with a crisp white cotton blouse underneath. She held a crop and hat in one hand and a fluted champagne glass in the other. Colin wasn’t sure if the real Angie would ever be seen in this ensemble, but he found it easier to imagine her in hunting duds than Ruby in her getup, or him in his, for that matter.
Like Ruby, Angie was surrounded by other women, in this case, all in riding attire.
In the second and third rooms, all the women were dressed similarly. In both rooms, there was a large crowd. In both rooms, there were no men
in attendance.
Colin’s dream, like a great many dreams, was a study in motionlessness.
Although Colin Tugdale would spend the length of his dream desiring to get to one or other of the other rooms, he was utterly unsuccessful. He was never able to leave the room he was in. He pushed his way through gathered groups, he mumbled his apologies, he elbowed largely oblivious guests out of his way, but his ultimate destination was a faraway door that he never managed to reach.
Despite the enduring frustration he felt, he was also, within the logic of the dream, slightly thankful. Because it was never clear to him which of the two rooms he would or should head for, if he was ever to manage to engineer his escape. And his indecision left him feeling a mixture of guilt and guilty relief.
Colin was perpetually uncomfortable in his dream. For one thing, he was too warm in his wool jacket. The party was a daytime affair, and the sun was high and bright in the sky outside the house. He could see a circular drive at the front of the house, composed of tiny pale red stones that crunched satisfyingly under the weight of luxury car tires. There was a pond with a statue in the center of the drive. The statue, made of green-mossed stone, depicted a partially clothed nymph brandishing a chalice in her weed-draped hands.
Colin wasn’t entirely sure what a nymph was; his sense of nymphs and sprites and fairies in general was distressingly vague. But in his dream the statue was unquestionably a nymph.
In his dream Colin was aware of several other facts. Ruby and Angie knew each other. Ruby and Angie liked each other. Ruby and Angie were both anxious to see Colin. Ruby and Angie also could not leave their respective rooms. Ruby and Angie were not aware that this was a dream. Colin, on the other hand, was.
As the futility of his situation showed no likelihood of ending, Colin had no choice but to force his dream to end.
But Colin Tugdale still awoke from his dream with the pervasive sense that he was guilty of something.
JUSTIN
There was no longer a paper for Justin to deliver. He was not due to work at the diner until Monday. The party for Avril on Sunday would be an excruciating experience he was better off not enduring. He felt bad about blowing off the Tap in the evening. It would be a busy night. Andy had been a good boss, even if Andy’s father had taken Justin’s college money from his worthless parents. On Monday morning, the Tidy and Ruiz families would manage just fine without him.
Justin rode the local bus for two hours, heading north and west to the city in the early morning.
Although it picked up few people, the bus made slow progress. At one point, the driver pulled up outside a coffee shop to use the restroom. Justin told the driver he would get himself something at the shop. The driver offered no objection, and Justin bought a large coffee.
He had packed his duffel the night before. It was the same one he had taken north a decade before. Packing was easy, because he had considered and reconsidered the selection of contents at least a million times.
He had made many modifications. The things he had taken the first time had been adequate at best. Now he included a small towel that would become a blanket or a pillow, dry fast, and pack easily. Swimsuit. T-shirts. A waterproof jacket. His water shoes he would wear. He intended to walk more and paddle less, and sandals wouldn’t be substantial enough to hike very far. He had observed one adult on the first trip pull on a pair of thick wool socks at the end of each day. It was, the adult proudly remarked, his single item of shameless luxury.
Justin had looked on enviously. Now he had his very own pair.
He had notebooks and pencils and a map of the canoe area wilderness that a kind teacher at the junior college had laminated for him. He would pick up new maps at the outfitters. He knew the details constantly changed. Portages were redrawn. Old campsites were retired, and new ones needed to be broken in.
He would need to make some changes to his own map.
Several summers ago, a section of the area had burned out of control for days. The weather had been unusually dry, and lightning had struck. Smoke and ash carried for hundreds of miles. Justin had read that, while the outfitters had a sprinkling system that had saved their buildings, much of the nearby forest land had been consumed. Justin thought he remembered someone quoted as saying that the fire had been a natural occurrence, and therefore it had been allowed to burn unhindered for as long as it took to go out naturally.
COLIN
Although Colin brought his overnight bag, he wasn’t planning to go anywhere. The drive to the airport was in heavy traffic and it took him over an hour. He intended to park in the remote lot, because it seemed the most anonymous, and it was always the cheapest option. He wasn’t sure if there was a minimum stay required, but he would find that out soon enough.
And then he changed his plan.
He was certain that he had never noticed a sign offering rewards parking before. But this time he did see it. He followed the circuitous route to an underground location. He punched his temporary code number into a keypad at the entrance to the garage, and then once again at the door to a discreetly placed elevator, after he had abandoned his car.
The elevator door opened noiselessly only feet from the entrance to the rewards suite he had visited a few nights before.
He considered entering what he now liked to think of as his “lucky” numbers into the keypad on the wall, even though the gesture had previously proved pointless. Instead, he entered the four numbers of his allocated temporary code and gained admittance.
The interior of the rewards suite was once again muted and empty, and Colin, having recently shelled out a large sum to be deemed worthy of full membership, was not surprised.
Money buys silence.
He was careful to sit where he sat before. As before, he was smothered in a balm of soothing jazz music. This time a guitar and bass combination were playing what sounded to Colin very much like a James Bond theme.
He placed his overnight bag where it was visible. Did it look a little anemic? Could anyone tell that there was nothing inside it?
He requested a coffee from a young man he did not recall seeing on his previous visit. He was not asked for his card, or for his money, or for his number, and Colin now began to understand how it was for the rich. He would be debited extravagantly at the end of the month, and it would be impossible to purchase anything that would equal, much less exceed, this astronomical amount.
But that wasn’t the point. Being rich meant being able to put a discreet distance between yourself and your money. It was there, but it was refined and rendered invisible.
He allocated less than a split second to look around.
Mr. Elliot Devine was not in the house tonight. The two gentlemen working the rewards suite did not look familiar. Colin recalled that his previous server had been a young woman wearing a Celtic cross necklace. There had also been a young man working that night.
Colin remembered a glass on the table in front of Devine. He thought it had been a whisky glass. Devine had been sitting smoking his cigar at the table closest to Colin. It would therefore make sense that they had both been served by the same woman.
What else did he remember about the woman who served him? He remembered the shortbread and the excellence of the coffee.
He had remembered the necklace because Ruby had owned a similar one, fashioned out of filigreed white gold. She had loved it. It was going to go to Tony now. Perhaps he would one day have a wife who would want to wear it.
His coffee arrived quickly, and once again came replete with a rectangle of lightly sugared shortbread.
Colin spoke up. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“I was here a few nights ago.”
“Then welcome back, sir.”
Colin pressed on, “There was a young lady who served me. I was sitting right here. At this table. I was hoping to see her working here tonight.”
Maybe it was because he hadn’t asked a question. There was no response.
Colin was forced to improvise.
“The thing is,” he began hesitantly. “I hadn’t remembered to tip her, and I wanted to make it up to her now.”
This gambit received the thinnest of smiles. “She isn’t here tonight, sir. You could leave it for her now. If you like.” The offer was a frosty one.
Colin could feel the veneer of politeness about to be scraped thin.
He kept going. “Yes. I suppose I could. Could you perhaps tell me her name?”
Could he sound any more pathetic?
He received the answer he deserved. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I couldn’t.”
At this juncture, Colin paused. He could quit now, or he could reveal himself as a total creep. He could keep coming back here, but that would be creepier still. Or he could press harder for her name right now. If he had her name, he could probably find her. Angie could definitely find her. Still creepy. But marginally less creepy?
He made a fast decision. In a moment the creep spoke. “I thought she was very pretty.”
Again, there was pained silence.
In desperation Colin opted for a robust display of man-to-man honesty. “I have to tell you: What I really wanted to do was ask her out.”
Conclusion Page 8