The Black Sheep

by Patricia Ryan

  HE COULDN’T MOVE. He lay on his back in the white sand and stared at the hot-pink sky and green palms, blue waves slapping the shore.

  A shadow fell over him. It was her. He saw her lips, those amazing lips. She knelt down and leaned over him, and he thought she was going to kiss him, but instead, she said, “Does it hurt?”

  He looked down. It was Alaskan snow he lay on now, and it burned, it was so cold. The reason he couldn’t move was the jagged pieces of metal that pierced him all along his left side, pinning him down like an insect in a case.

  “Does it hurt?” she repeated. He was consumed with hurt. Pain was all there was and all there ever would be.

  “No.” he said.

  She stood. ‘‘Liar.”

  She was gone. He tried to sit up, to reach for her, and the metal tore at his flesh.

  “No!” he gasped. He sat up in bed, sweating and shaking. “Fuck,” he whispered.

  He looked around. The maid’s room. Hale’s Point. Oh, yeah. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Wow.” He couldn’t even sleep without pain. Even in his dreams it pursued him.

  There was a digital clock on the night table. It was 8:05 a.m. Outside, the waves still lapped and retreated, but they didn’t sound right; too loud and too regular, just like they were in the dream.

  His bed stood against the back wall, a window within reach. He pulled the curtain back and pried apart the slats of the blinds, squinting against the bright sunlight. He could see all of the brick patio and most of the pool. The patio was scattered with teak furniture, including a large round table under an enormous square canvas umbrella. The pool took up a good part of what had been, in his boyhood, a flat expanse of broadloom lawn. The lawn ended fifty yards from the house in a low stone wall bordered with roses, lavender and creeping thyme.

  Beyond and below it, the rocky shore and Long Island Sound. From a gap in the stone wall, a hodgepodge of boulders set into the sandy precipice served as a kind of stairway to the beach. It was the Hales’ private beach, which included a tapering spit of land extending northward into the Sound—the point for which Hale’s Point was named—to which was appended a stone jetty. Some twelve acres of woodland, also Hale property, abutted the beach—prime North Shore real estate, entirely undeveloped except for the half acre or so immediately surrounding the house and stable, the latter of which R.H. had long ago converted into an eight-car garage for his collection of vintage sports cars. The Hales had fended off lucrative offers for the land for more than three centuries.

  He had loved the beach as a boy, but with his leg all but useless, he couldn’t even think about climbing down there.

  The sound he had taken for waves came from the pool, where Harley glided smoothly and swiftly through the azure water. Her arms curved in perfect arcs: her movements were graceful, but eerily mechanical. Every third stroke, like clockwork, she took a breath. Her pace never varied or slowed as she swam lap after lap.

  He lay back down and threw an arm over his eyes. How long had it been since he had swum? Ten years? Fifteen?

  He rolled over and tried to get to back to sleep, but the splashing kept him awake. Her pace was maniacally, irritatingly perfect.

  Finally, the splashing stopped. Tucker sat up and parted the blinds again. Still in the pool, she reached onto the smooth concrete deck for something—a black stopwatch—clicked it, and checked her time. Pushing against the deck, she propelled herself up and stepped nimbly out of the pool.

  She was compact and sleek, a healthy animal. For a woman her size, she had long legs, and they looked like they meant business. She wore a black swimsuit, one of those unlined Lycra racing suits, as revealing as skin. He could see the contours of her breasts as clearly as if she were naked; they were small, high, and firm, their nipples hard in the cool morning air.

  Tucker turned away from the window when he felt himself start to get hard. He took another shower to get the kinks out, combed his wet hair back to get it off his face, and put on a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt. He forgot what their original colors had been. Most of his clothes were army surplus—khaki, olive drab, and navy—so they had probably started out militarily neutral before fading, like everything else he owned, into a kind of used-up noncolor.

  He grabbed his cane and followed the aroma of freshly brewed coffee to the kitchen. She stood at the stove, cocooned in her white terry-cloth robe, holding a saucepan full of gray paste, which she was spooning into a bowl.

  The paste had pieces of something in it. When she saw him, she tilted the pot so he could get a better look. “Oatmeal with raisins, apples, and sunflower seeds. I made enough for you.”

  “You don’t have any glazed doughnuts, do you?” he asked.

  “That’s what you eat for breakfast?”

  He nodded, taking a seat at the big pine table and leaning his cane against it. “I’ve been known to have them for lunch and dinner, too.”

  She joined him at the table. “You are what you eat.”

  “I beg to differ. I saw you get out of the pool just now, and I know for a fact you’re not gray and lumpy.” She glanced at him and then spooned some oatmeal into her gorgeous mouth. “Do you swim every morning?”

  “A hundred laps. But usually I swim at six. I set the alarm two hours later today ’cause I was up half the night.” Her skin shone, her eyes glittered. She looked invigorated and happy. He figured she was probably just jazzed on endorphins, but she looked sensational. She looked like she’d just had great sex. The thought made him want to get up and untie the double-knotted sash on that terry-cloth robe.

  Instead, he said, “A hundred laps? You count them?” She nodded. “Doesn’t that kind of take the pleasure out of it?”

  “My morning swim is for exercise. And my afternoon run. My evening swim is for pleasure.”

  She was too much. “What happens if you suddenly find yourself enjoying your morning swim? Do you have to stop and take a break and think about something really annoying so you can get back in there and finish off your hundred laps in the right frame of mind?”

  She chewed slowly, watching him from across the table. “Are you mad because of the baseball bat?”

  “What?”

  “First the oatmeal, now my swimming. Are you mad because I—”

  “You really think I’m mad at you? You weren’t kidding when you said you couldn’t take a joke. Honey, you’ve got some serious chilling-out to do.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, and then she said, “I, uh, spoke to your father a little while ago.”

  “And?”

  “And he was shocked when I told him you were here. Didn’t seem too thrilled about it. I asked him if he wanted you to leave, and... he didn’t say anything for the longest time. I started to think maybe the call got dropped, but then he said...” Looking down, Harley pried up another lump of oatmeal. “Well, the gist of it was, you can stay till he gets back if you want.”

  “Yeah? Hunh. I figured there was a better than even chance I’d be hitting the road this morning.” He sighed and turned to look out the window, squinting at the bright sunlight. “Maybe I should anyway,” he murmured. “I’m starting to wonder what the hell I’m doing here.”

  “What are you doing here? I mean, after twenty years—”

  “Twenty-one,” he corrected.

  “Twenty-one. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea why you left. My guess is it had something to do with rules and expectations, and what is and isn’t done. A father who thought he knew everything and a son who knew he knew everything.”

  Her insight amused him. “It’s a little more complicated, but that’s it in a nutshell.”

  She looked at him over the top of her coffee cup. “You’ve had no contact at all with your father for twenty-one years?” He shook his head. “So what’s this all about? Why are you back?”

  He rubbed his long fingers over the scarred pine, composing an answer. After a few seconds of watching him, she rose and went to the stove to refill her bowl.
The oatmeal had congealed into a solid mass, and she had to use her fingers to push wads of it off the wooden spoon. “Forget it, Tucker. I didn’t mean to pry. I ask too many questions, I always have.”

  “No, it’s okay. Mostly I’m just here for R and R. I’ve got some healing up to do, and I thought this might be the place to do it.” He shrugged. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” There was more to it than that, of course. He could have rested up in his own home instead of the one he had fled twenty-one years ago. If she was thinking these same thoughts, she didn’t voice them.

  Her gaze took in the scar on his face and dropped toward his injured leg, but the table hid it from her view. “What happened to you?” she asked, taking her seat.

  Tucker wanted a cigarette. Badly. He reached into the pocket of his T-shirt before remembering: R.H. did not permit smoking in the house, and his personally appointed majordomo prided herself on making sure those orders were followed.

  Rising, he brought his cup over to the counter to refill it, not needing the cane, since it was just a couple of yards. Her stopwatch was lying next to the coffeemaker, and he picked it up, shaking his head. You needed one to time a swim meet, but not for your morning exercise. Unless, of course, you were the kind of person—like R.H. and, apparently, Harley—who didn’t believe something was real unless you could count it.

  “I got hurt,” he finally said.

  “Fair enough. I’m out of line.”

  “No, you’re not.” He spoke softly, turning the stopwatch over in his hands, his back to her. “You’re just being polite. You’re trying to make conversation. You’re asking me about myself. But the truth is, you don’t really know me, and you don’t really care.”

  He set the watch down and turned to face her and found her jaw set and her eyes glittering. “It’s okay.” He tried to make his tone gentle and nonthreatening, but realized even as he spoke the words, how condescending he sounded. “I have no problem with that. But I’d rather you didn’t go through the motions of pretending you did.”

  She gripped the table with both hands. “Don’t tell me what I feel. You don’t know me any better than I know you, and you don’t know what I care about.”

  He held up both palms. “Look, honey, I just—”

  “And don’t call me honey. I don’t like it.”

  “All right...” A second ticked by as they stared at each other. “Sweetheart.”

  She stood and stalked out of the room. “It’s a joke,” he said to her back. Groaning, he slumped against the counter and rubbed hard at the back of his aching neck. “You know. Jokes? Those things you laugh at? Well...” he mumbled, “not you, but... normal people?”

  HARLEY LOOKED DOWN on Tucker from the window of his old room, the cleaning basket in one hand and the pull cord of the wooden blinds in the other. He lay out there on the patio, faceup on a lounge chair, asleep in the early-afternoon sun. Or probably asleep. She couldn’t see his eyes under the aviator sunglasses he wore. He still hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t done anything all morning except read the paper, smoke some cigarettes, eat the peanut-butter sandwich she’d made him, and sleep. Well, that was his right. He said he’d come here for R and R—rest and relaxation—and considering his torn-up body, he could probably use it.

  He obviously wasn’t after a suntan. He hadn’t removed his T-shirt, and although he was wearing shorts, he had the open newspaper spread over his legs like a blanket. One hand rested on his flat stomach, the other on the ground. For a guy who didn’t seem to do much, he looked to be in great shape. Even through the T-shirt, she could make out the well-defined muscles of his chest and shoulders.

  Last night, when she had seen him in that towel, her heart had raced, and she had actually blushed! Those incredibly wide shoulders, those narrow hips. His arms and legs went on forever, powerful and sinewy. It was the kind of body you’d see at the Olympics, crouching at the edge of a pool, waiting for the crack of a starter’s pistol.

  His beauty made his scars that much more shocking. Whatever had happened to him looked like something you wouldn’t expect to live through. He had said he was damn good at surviving, and she suspected he knew what he was talking about.

  She hadn’t been entirely truthful about her conversation with Raleigh Hale that morning. True, he’d given his tacit permission for Tucker to stay, but what he’d actually said, after his pensive silence, was, It’s your call. You’ll be the one having to put up with him all summer, not I.

  She still wasn’t sure why she’d decided to let Tucker remain there—not that he would necessarily stay all summer, given his ambivalence about being here—but she was absolutely sure that she didn’t want him to know she’d had any choice in the matter.

  On top of a large desk sat a vintage desktop computer, a Nintendo, and a stack of game cartridges. In order to make room for the cleaning basket, she had to push aside a stack of magazines two decades old, topped with an unusual paperweight: a big cat, leaping, cast in chrome—the hood ornament from a Jaguar. What an appropriate bauble, she thought, for a boy with everything, a child of immense wealth, brought up in one of the most exclusive communities in the world—a community named after his own family.

  He sprang from privilege, she from deprivation. Looking at them now, anyone would think it had been the other way around. In fact, although she hated to admit it, in some ways he reminded her of her parents; like them, he was a square peg in a round hole, although not so extreme. He did, after all, own his own business. Her aimless, self-destructive parents could never have managed that.

  Her efforts to lead an orderly, right-thinking life amused him. A bohemian blue blood like Tucker Hale might laugh at her straight-and-narrow path, but only by keeping to it could she ensure that she would be spared in adulthood the poverty and tragedy that she could not escape as a child.

  She withdrew a feather duster from the cleaning basket and flicked it over the hood ornament and the magazine on top— a Rolling Stone. Curious, she thumbed through the rest: one or two each of Car and Driver, Sail, Sailing World, and Sports Illustrated, and about a dozen Playboys.

  A framed black-and-white studio portrait sat on the desk, and she touched the duster to it: a beautiful young woman with black hair and large dark eyes holding a baby in her arms. The infant Tucker and his mother, she guessed. Tucker had her eyes. In the photograph, she wore her hair pulled back. Ornate earrings with dark stones in them dangled from her ears. An equally striking ring graced her left land—a large cabochon stone with what looked like two little hands, one on either side, holding it in place. Nestled next to it she wore a simple gold band, presumably her wedding ring.

  Harley scanned the room. Until now, she had avoided coming in here. She had thought it a kind of shrine to a dead son, and it had given her the creeps. Now that she knew it was, instead, a shrine to a wayward son, it intrigued her.

  In addition to the dartboard, the walls were festooned with posters having to do with sports and music. Above the bed—an antique four-poster with an incongruous-looking batik bedspread—hung a huge black-and-white photograph of Sophia Loren standing in water, her clothes soaked and clinging. Hmm.

  She turned to the shelves. The trophies that served as bookends were all topped with sleek male figures in swim trunks, crouched and ready to spring. Precisely the pose in which she had, moments ago, envisioned Tucker’s built-for-speed body. So he had been a swimmer. As she dusted the trophies, she glanced at their inscriptions: 1500-Meter Freestyle, First Place... 200-Meter Butterfly, First Place...

  There were innumerable model boats, planes, and cars. Three long shelves bulged with CDs and a few DVDs. And books, yards and yards of them arranged in shelves all the way up to the ceiling. She glanced at some of the titles, wondering what the teenage Tucker liked to read. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Huckleberry Finn, The Kama Sutra. Hmm. She picked up the last one, a small hardcover; its spine made a cracking sound when she opened it.

  “Find anything interesting?” His voice made her j
ump. He stood in the doorway, leaning on his cane.

  “No.” she lied, then made a show of dusting and replacing the book.

  He came up behind her and slid it out of its place, smiling when he saw the title. “I haven’t read this for a while.” He held it out to her. “You’ll like it. It’s all about control.” She had changed into the blue spandex bike shorts and cropped white tank top that she would run in later, and as he returned the book, she saw his quick, appreciative glance.

  She backed away. “What are you doing up here? I thought you couldn’t walk up the stairs.”

  “No, I can make it up a flight of stairs. It just...” He shrugged.

  “Hurts?”

  “It’s a bit of a challenge. I try not to do it too often. I came up ’cause I saw you at the window.”

  Oh, no. She turned away and ran the duster mechanically over the models. He wasn’t asleep. He saw me staring at him.

  “Wow,” he whispered, his gaze taking in the room and its contents. He seemed particularly interested in the poster above the bed. “Sophia! You’re still here! Mamma mia! I’m a happy boy. Maybe I’ll sleep up here, after all.”

  Harley couldn’t help smiling. “She does have beautiful eyes.”

  “Everyone’s got beautiful eyes. But Sophia has those lips! Look at them!” He smiled at her. “I’ve always been a sucker for great lips.” He looked at her mouth, and Harley didn’t know where to look, so she turned away, shook some furniture polish onto a rag, and went to work on the oak bookcases.

  After a minute of silence, she became curious and turned to find him standing at his old desk, staring at the photograph of himself as an infant in his mother’s arms, his expression solemn. When he realized Harley was watching him, he looked away and continued examining the room.

  “My guitars! Both of them! This is my favorite—the twelve-string.” She heard the bedsprings creak as he sat. While she polished, her back to him, he adjusted the instrument, then began to play. She didn’t recognize the tune, but it was nice, with a kind of country-blues flavor. From that he drifted into a bit of something very baroque and complicated and then some lively Spanish guitar.