Being a monster was not as terrible as being abandoned by his father. Nothing on earth could be worse. Forgotten by your father? A child goes on loving a father who drinks too much, or beats him, or does drugs … but a father who leaves the son to endure horror forever … and even forgets that he did that … it was the ultimate divorce.
Abandoned. The word took on a terrible force. She could see his feet—that father’s feet—as they walked away. Never to turn around. She could hear the cries, echoing over the years: that son, calling his father’s name. Never to hear an answer.
“I try not to hate him,” said Jethro. “I try to remember that there were no choices for him. The curse carried him away from me and kept him away. But he was my father!” The voice rose like the howl of a dying animal into the winter air. “He was my father! I thought he would come! I waited and waited and waited.”
The voice sagged, and fell, and splintered on the forest floor.
“Oh, Jethro!” she said, and hugged him. He was sharp and craggy but the tighter she held her arms the more he softened. She felt him becoming the boy again, felt the power of her caring for him fight the power of the curse upon him. He removed his heavy hand from her eyes but she kept them closed for a while anyhow.
“You can emerge from the cave and be a real person some of the time,” she said.
“It’s a gift of the light. Sunlight, usually. I am surprised that the moonlight is giving me this now. Sunshine is a friend. It doesn’t end the curse, but sometimes it gives me a doorway to the world. Haven’t you noticed that I am only in school on sunny days? I cannot touch the world except on bright days.”
“I will make all your days bright,” said Nicoletta.
“You have,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “I think of you when I cannot leave.”
For a long time they sat in each other’s arms. Moonlight glittered on the fallen snow and danced on the icy fingers of trees. Very carefully she turned to look at him. He was Jethro. She sighed with relief. He had been in there all along, and she—she, Nicoletta Storms—had freed him with her presence. “At least I’ll see you in school,” she said.
“No. I can’t go again.”
“Why not? Why not? You have to! Oh, Jethro, you have to come back to school! I have to see you!” She gripped his arms and held him hard.
“You must forget about me.”
“I can’t. I won’t. You don’t want me to. I don’t want to. We’re not going to forget about each other.”
He said nothing.
“Why do you come to school?” she asked him.
“To dream of how it might have been. You are my age. The age, anyway, that I was once. The age when I fell. I hear human voices, I recognize laughter. I see human play and friendship.”
Oh, the loneliness of the dark!
She pictured her family. How loving they were. How warm the small house was. She thought of Jethro, returning every time to the dark and the rage of the trapped undead. She kissed him, hungrily, to kiss away his loss. Around them the trees leaned closer and looked deeper. “Jethro, it feels as if the woods are alive,” she whispered.
“They are,” said Jethro. “We were all something else once. Every tree and stone. Every lake and ledge.”
Horror surrounded her. She breathed it into her lungs and felt it crawl into her hair, like bats. She could not look into the woods.
“You must go home. You must never come again.”
“But I love you.”
He flinched. He pushed her away, and then could not bear that, because nobody had loved him in so very long. He held her more tightly than ever, cherishing the thought. Somebody loved him.
Love works only when it circles, and it had circled. It had enclosed them both. She loved him and he loved her back. He had to love her enough to make her stay away.
“Never come near the cave again. They know about you. They will look for you now, and guide your steps so that you fall. They will take you, Nicoletta. What else do they have to do for all eternity? Nothing. They will never be buried by fire at sea. You must go and never come back.”
She was unmoved. Nobody would tell her never to do anything. Nobody would tell her that she could find true love and then have to walk away from it! No. She would always come back.
“Nicoletta,” he said. His voice was hollow now, like a reed … or a cave.
“If you get too close, not only will you fall, I—cursed by the cave—I would do to you what my own father did to me.”
She was looking into his eyes, eyes like precious gemstones. I love you, she thought.
He said, “I would abandon you.”
Abandon her? She could not believe it. He loved her. Love did not abandon.
“Abandon you forever, Nicoletta. In the dark. Turning to stone. Forgotten. I would not come back. Nobody would ever come back for you.”
The moon hid behind wispy clouds. The night was too old to be called night. Jethro left. He had been there, and then he was not. She was alone on the stone in the dark.
For he did love her.
And to prove it, he had to leave. And so did she.
Chapter 16
IT HAD TAKEN GREAT courage to walk into the woods.
It took none to walk out.
If Jethro was not afraid of what the trees and ledges had once been, how could she be afraid? She said good-bye to the boulder, but it said and did nothing, which surprised her. She had expected a response after the conversation and the agony it had heard; the loving it had seen.
When she reached the paved road, she would have to put away these things. Enter into her other life.
How distant it seemed—her other world.
Nicoletta touched the pavement.
Dawn was coming. Quickly the sun threw scarlet threads into the sky, and quickly the snow turned pink in greeting. As if they were flirting and blushing. Like me, she thought. She smiled to herself, and then smiled at the sun.
She walked swiftly. She was happy.
What is there to be happy about? she thought. That the sun rises? That I love Jethro but he doesn’t want me to come again?
And yet she was happy in a liquid way, as if she were still all one, a water glass of pure happiness, a crystal cylinder of delight.
Love, she thought. I know what it is now. It’s every molecule of you. It connects you to yourself, even if you cannot be connected to the person who caused it.
Jethro. Oh, it was a beautiful name!
A car turned down the DEAD END road.
She had not wanted the other world to appear so soon.
A second vehicle followed it.
She considered hiding. Stepping off the road into the trees. She knew that the trees would take her in. Circle her, and blind the cars to her presence for Jethro’s sake. Snow, its sides packed like a ski jump by a plow, and a little, green holly tree without berries were on either side of her. She could hunch down behind the sharp, leather leaves and not be seen.
The first vehicle was Christo’s van. The second vehicle was a television network van.
Nicoletta had omitted the part that counted. She had entertained herself. She had run to Jethro for talk and love and comfort and daydreams. But the important part of what she had needed to do before morning, she had skipped.
Christo, who was equally liquid and crystal with love. Christo, who was hot and surging with the need to show off, to hunt, to capture or to destroy.
Not only had Christo come. He had brought teams. Witnesses. Camera film. And, no doubt, weapons.
She thought of the cave. The long fall that Christo and his TV crew would take. The horrible slime and sand and narrowing walls of shining stone. The knowledge that they were doomed. Of course, they would not have that knowledge as they fell. They would think there was a way out. Or that rescue would come.
How many days, or weeks … or years … would they struggle against their fate? How long before they became, as Jethro had become, part of the cave? Just another outcro
pping of sand and rock and dripping water? Would she, Nicoletta, in that other world have grown up and had children and grandchildren and been buried herself by the time Christo understood and surrendered to his fate?
The van rushed down the narrow road.
Christo drove too fast, gripping the wheel of his car, leaning forward as if trying to see beyond the windshield and through the woods, behind the rock and into the cave. He looked neither left nor right, only ahead. He didn’t see the packed snow and the holly, let alone Nicoletta. She had a glimpse of his profile as he sped past. How handsome he was. How young and perfect.
And how excited. He thought this would be an adventure. And oh! it would be. But not one in which he conquered.
She could not let him fall! Nor could she let those poor strangers in the van meet that fate.
The television van came much more slowly. Its driver was middle-aged and frowning, studying the road, the snow, the sky, as if he were worrying about a change in the weather, the studio deadline, his taxes, his wife, and his aching feet all at the same time.
He could have been her father.
He was surely somebody’s father. Would he, like the hunters, end up forever fallen?
I have to do something, she thought. But what? I can’t talk them out of it. The more information I give them, the more eager they’ll be. The more I explain, the quicker they’ll rush to see for themselves. And even if they stay away from the cave, even if I can convince them to stay in the meadow, or between the lakes, or among the trees … they’ll try to shoot Jethro.
I have no control. I have no moves. I have no way to turn.
This is not the world of the ancient Indians who understood that there were mysteries, and that mysteries should not be touched. This is the world of the television networks, who think that everything on earth belongs to them and ought to be captured on their cameras.
Perhaps she owed Christo nothing; after all, she did not love him; it was he who loved her. Perhaps she should let them go, and let Jethro control what happened.
But love was too precious. Even if it was not hers, and would never be hers, how could she be part of its ending? She did not love Christo, but it counted that he loved her.
The television van was almost upon her.
She flung herself out from behind the piled snow and the little holly tree … directly under the wheels of the van.
“She jumped!” said the van driver constantly. “I swear it. The girl jumped right in front of me.”
“I slipped,” Nicoletta explained. It was not easy to talk because of the pain. The broken leg was so very broken. Pieces of bone stuck out of her flesh like long white splinters. “Snow,” she explained. “Ice. No sand on the road yet. It’s my fault. I should have been more careful.”
Whatever spell Christo had cast to coax a network to send a crew, had dried up. The people who had been eager to film whatever this kid thought he’d seen, especially since it was near the disappearing point of the two hunters, were now interested in nothing but getting through a terrible day. The van driver was desperate to be sure everybody understood it was not his fault. He said this to Nicoletta’s parents and to the doctors and the admitting secretary in the emergency room and to Christo.
Christo had questions of his own to ask Nicoletta, but being severely hurt provided its own camouflage. She need only close her eyes, rest her long lashes on her pale cheeks, and whisper. “I’m tired, Christo, visit me tomorrow.” And he had to leave. No options.
The cast was big and white and old-fashioned. No vinyl and metal athletic brace for a break this bad; solid heavy-duty plaster and bandage was like a rock attached to her leg. She had always rather hoped to be wearing a cast one day, and attract lots of sympathetic attention, and have to use crutches.
But now she faced a new nightmare.
How will I go back to Jethro? thought Nicoletta. I can’t get through the woods with this. I can’t use crutches in the snow.
Not only had she stopped Christo and the TV crew from looking for Jethro, she had stopped herself.
People asked what she had been doing, anyway, on some remote road at the crack of dawn? There was only one acceptable excuse and she used it. “I’ve taken up jogging, you know. I’ve been running every morning.”
Her parents had not known this, but then, they didn’t get up before dawn and could not say she hadn’t been.
Jamie was too jealous of the attention Nicoletta was getting to ask difficult questions. Jamie kept looking around for cute interns instead.
When Nicoletta woke up in the afternoon, she was alone in a quiet hospital room with pastel walls. The other bed was empty. There was something eerie about the flat white sheets and the untouched, neatly folded, cotton blanket on the other bed. It was waiting for its next victim.
The door was closed. She had no sense of noise or action or even human beings around her. She might have been alone at the bottom of the cave, she was so alone in the bare, pale room.
Her leg hurt.
Her head ached.
I’ll never even be able to tell Jethro what I did for him, she thought, in a burst of self-pity. I’ll hobble around by myself and nobody will care.
The door was flung open, banging heavily into the pastel plaster wall.
The Madrigals burst into the room, singing as they came. It was so corny. They were singing an old European hiking song: “And as we go, we love to sing, our knapsacks on our backs. Foll-der-oolllll, foll-der-eeeeee, our knapsacks on our backs.”
She was so glad to see them that it made her cry. It was hokey, but it was beautiful. It was friendship.
“Now, now,” said Ms. Quincy, “we won’t stay long, it’s too exhausting for somebody as badly hurt as you are. We just wanted you to be sure you know that you’re among friends.”
Nicoletta looked up, thinking, Ms. Quincy had a lot of nerve, when she’d kicked Nicoletta away from those friends. But out loud she said, “Hi, everybody. I’m glad to see you.”
They all kissed her, and Christo’s kiss was no different from anybody else’s. She wanted to catch his hand, and see if he was all right. Ask what he was thinking. But she didn’t really want to know.
Rachel had brought colored pens so everybody could sign the cast. Rachel herself wrote, “I love you, Nickie! Get well soon!”
This meant everybody could write, I love you, Nickie, and they did. David and Jeff, whom she hardly knew, wrote, “I love you, Nickie, get well soon.” Cathy did, Lindsay did, even Anne-Louise. “Love you, Nickie!”
Christo was last. She had to do something. She was out of action, but he might return to the cave anyway. She had to exert some sort of pull on him.
“Why were you there?” he breathed. “What were you doing? It was awfully far from home to be jogging.”
“I knew you were coming, Christo,” she murmured. “I wanted to watch you in action. I wanted to be part of it.” She squeezed his hand. “Promise me you won’t do anything unless I’m along to watch you, Christo?”
Everything about him softened. The love he had for her surfaced so visibly that the girl Madrigals were touched and the boy Madrigals were embarrassed. Nicoletta blushed, but not from love. Because he believed her. Because love, among all the other things it was, was gullible. Everybody had written, “Love you, Nickie,” but he wrote on her cast, “I love you more. Christo.”
The Madrigals left, singing again, this time a burbling Renaissance song that imitated brooks and flutes. It was a lullabye, and Nicoletta slept, deep and long.
She dreamed that she was falling.
Falling in dreadfully icy cold, wind whipping through her hair and freezing her lungs. She dreamed that her hand was reaching for something to catch. Anything! A branch, a rock, a ladder, a rope—
—but found only sand.
The flat of her palm slid across the grit, finding nothing to hold, nothing at all, and the black forever hole below her opened its mouth.
In her sleep she screamed silently, beca
use everything in that terrible world was dark and silent, and in one last desperate try she tightened her grip.
She found a hand. It held her. It saved her. She woke. It was Jethro’s hand. He had come. He was safe. He had not been hurt, and nobody had hurt him. He was here in a pastel hospital room.
He leaned over her bed and found her lips. He kissed her as lightly as air and whispered, “Nicoletta. Oh, Nicoletta. I love you.”
Even when used by strangers like David and Jeff, or people at whom she was angry like Ms. Quincy, those three words remained beautiful. But from the lips of the boy she loved, those three words were the most beautiful on earth. “I love you, too,” she whispered. A rare smile illuminated his face, momentarily safe from its terrible burdens. They held hands, and his was graveled and rasping, and hers was soft and silken.
Chapter 17
JETHRO YELLED AT NICOLETTA, albeit softly. “You could have been killed!”
“I know that now, but there wasn’t time to think of that then.”
“What were you thinking of?” he demanded.
“You.”
The quiet of the hospital room deepened, and the pale colors of the walls intensified. Her hand in his felt warmer and his hand in hers felt gentler. “I can’t stay long,” he said.
“Why not? Stay forever.”
He smiled sadly. He understood what forever meant. She had no grasp.
“Then I’ll talk fast. Jethro, I have ideas.” Her eyes burned with excitement. “The thing is,” she said, “to bury them. Right?”
“To bury them?” repeated Jethro.
“The ancient souls! They didn’t get buried. That’s the problem, right? So we have to bury them. We’ll blast the cave! We’ll dynamite them up! Or else we’ll flood the cave! Or else we’ll bring torches. We’ll get toy wooden boats to count as their ships and set fire to those!”
He did not respond.
“Jethro! Don’t you think those ideas are terrific?”
He said instead, “Who do you think you will have if you have me?”
The Stranger Page 9