by Amber Foxx
Going back in the house through the front door, Mae locked it, wondering if she still had anything of Ruth’s with which to do a psychic search. No. They had cleaned out every trace, drunk her beer and thrown out her trash, aired the furniture, washed the linens, and scrubbed walls. Ruth was eradicated. The only way to find out anything would be to ask her in person.
Except, she could hardly be expected to talk to a total stranger about something that stranger shouldn’t even know. It might be easier to get some small object Ruth had handled tomorrow at her opening.
As she showered and readied for bed, Mae sorted through all the other ways she could find out why the police had not gone to the bridge. She could look in the archives of the local paper. There had to be articles, if she knew what week in the past winter this had taken place. Would the details she needed be there?
Mae picked up Pie to place her on the bed. Why was she clinging to this mystery? What would it accomplish if she solved it? It wouldn’t save Dusty, or spare Jamie the trauma of having found him, or the guilt over failing to save him. Still, more information might help Jamie move some of the blame from himself to Ruth or the police. It wouldn’t make things right, just a tiny bit better. In the shape he was in, even the smallest relief could matter. That would be one last thing she could do for him.
She turned on the starry ceiling and lay down, resting one hand on Pie’s bony back, feeling the small ribs expand and contract. Time passing with each breath. The old cat probably was on the cusp, like Jamie had said. Jamie thought too much about death.
But he also lived, intensely. Was she half-living her days, unfulfilled? Mae honestly didn’t know. What did he see in her that made him think that? What was she missing?
To Jamie, being happy ten times a day in the midst of his struggles was enough. He didn’t expect to be healed, or to be normal. Just to have good moments, and someone to take care of.
Motor noises outside stirred her briefly in the morning, but it had been so hard to fall asleep she drifted back into a half-dream state and lingered in bed. Smelling coffee. How nice. Hubert must have gotten up early and made breakfast. She rolled over, expecting to see the bedroom of their house in Tylerton, the old brown nightstand and the rumpled pillows, the pale blue wallpaper with the tiny flowers in it. Instead she saw the turquoise walls, the Mexican painted chest and chair, and remembered where she was. It hurt to have drifted back into her marriage. The dream was so lifelike she could still smell the coffee.
No, the aroma was real. How could it be? Had she programmed the coffeemaker? She didn’t remember doing that. Or turning off the starry ceiling. Another odd thing—Pie had left the bed. It was a hard jump for the old cat. She usually waited to be handed down onto the floor, like a little old lady being helped across a street. Mae rose and pulled on her bathrobe. She’d left windows open and the house had cooled overnight. Coffee smell must be from outside somehow.
Walking out into the living room, she noticed that the crystals she had left in the garden were now arranged on the coffee table like a rock garden around the corn maiden fetish, with a few stalks of sage and lavender like an offering at a shrine. She hadn’t done that. No. He couldn’t—yes, he could have. She hadn’t locked the back door after she took out the trash. Jamie.
She hurried into the kitchen. He stood at the stove, singing softly, stirring something with a spatula, Pie rubbing around his ankles. His hair was damp, as if he’d just gotten back from a swim, and the little braids had come partially undone. The nerve of him, walking in and ... fixing breakfast. Trying to prove yet again that he could take care of her. He was making it harder and harder to get rid of him, and more important that she should.
The urge to scold him died away into a soft heap of pain. On weekend mornings, Hubert had cooked breakfast for her and the girls, and the memory of being a family barged in on top of her conflicts about Jamie. Her voice came out sounding sadder than she’d meant to. “You should have knocked, sugar.”
He turned with a start. “Fuck—sorry. You scared me. Didn’t think you were up. I was going to bring it to you in bed.” He held his free hand up, made an erasing gesture across his face. “I mean, breakfast. Came out wrong. Sorry.” He flashed a grin. “Let’s start over. G’day, love. Sleep well? You sound a little down. You doing all right?”
“Well enough, I reckon.” She didn’t want to talk with him about missing Hubert. His concern was as uncomfortably intimate as his presence in her kitchen. “Heard something earlier. Was that your van?”
“Yeah. Sorry. It does its Elvis impersonation for like ten minutes after I cut it off.” He imitated a cross between the engine and the “uh-huh-huh” section of Elvis’s All Shook Up, and then sang a few lines of the song in a low motor-ish voice. “Ought to take the old clunker to Vegas.”
She sat at the table, laughing in spite of her objection to his being there, and he brought her a mug of coffee.
“You take it black?” he asked. “I like it that way. Taste the beans, y’know?”
She nodded, inhaled the scent of coffee before drinking. “Yeah, thanks.”
“Aromatherapy. Best kind. Doesn’t it just,” he took a dramatic breath, did a little wriggly, sizzling dance, “do something to your spine?” Returning to the stove, he slurped his coffee loudly, “Fuck. Manners. Sorry,” and picked up the spatula again. “Making scrambled tofu with green chile. Muffins in the oven. Almost ready.”
“I was gonna be mad at you for walking in without knocking.”
“But you’re not?”
“I kind of still am. I mean, I didn’t invite you for breakfast.” Pie weaved around his legs. She would have mewed to be lifted and set down before she would have jumped from the bed on her own. Jamie might have come into the bedroom. Turned off the stars, collected the cat. He didn’t make a sound when he walked, just glided around like those long-legged bugs that walked on water. Easily, he could have intruded far worse than cooking without an invitation. “And I sure as heck didn’t want you in my bedroom. Did you do that?”
“Fuck. I didn’t molest you. I—”
“I know. You got Pie and you turned off the star lights. Like you live here. Like you have some right to walk in while I’m sleeping. You don’t.”
“Sorry.” His voice faded, and he stared down at the stove. “Thought I was being kind. Y’know? I’d bring you this feast and you’d wake up and smile and it’d be nice, not waking up alone.”
With a sigh, Mae sipped her coffee while Jamie opened the oven and slid a pan of muffins out, setting it on hot pads on the counter, and poked at the tofu again with the spatula. She noticed he had peeled oranges and arranged the sections along the edges of plates. Damn. He’d probably been so excited while he did it. Happy-anxious, and afraid of rejection.
“I mean, you were married, you’re used to having someone.” Jamie served the scrambled-egg-like concoction and a muffin onto each plate and brought them to the table. “Got to be hard every morning, y’know? Wake up, no one there.”
“I’m trying to get good with not having him. For me, that means I need to be alone.”
“Fuck.” Jamie froze, about to sit down. “Jeezus.” He closed his eyes, squeezed the back of his chair. Mae sensed he was stifling one of his tantrums. He probably wanted to dramatize the rejection. If he threw anything or stuck a knife in something, he’d be out on his ear. After a tense moment, he yanked his chair out and dropped into it. “I’m a fucking idiot.”
“Not an idiot, Jamie. But I think you did what you needed. You’re lonely, so you think I am. You meant well. But ask—”
“I don’t think I asked you to do whatever the fuck you did with those crystals yesterday.” Attacking his food, he slid tofu off his plate as well as shoving it into his mouth. Mae wanted to say something about manners, but maybe it wasn’t the time. “So we’re even.”
“I shouldn’t have done that.” Mae picked up a muffin, but couldn’t eat, and set it back down. “You’re right. I should have asked.�
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“Really, because I think you—did something, y’know? I tried to stop you, but there was this little buzz. And—fuck, now it’s like ‘Reject me, I dare you.’ I’m hanging myself up like a fucking piñata for you to whack at.” He continued eating as if someone were going to steal his plate, talking with his mouth full. “What in bloody hell were you trying to heal?”
Your manners. No, don’t say that. What had she aimed at? She’d been looking for the roots of his career problems, but she’d found more. She should have stopped the process when he left his advisor’s office, and sent the healing then. Softly, watching his eyes for further signs of anger or fear, she said, “The things that make you scared about your work.”
“You don’t even know what those are. You could have messed with fuck-all—anything.” Dropping his fork, he pushed away from the table and paced across the room. “Jesus. I told you not to do that. I don’t want to be your patient, your sick person. I want you to like me. To love me. Not to fucking rescue me.”
Mae felt ashamed of her invasion into his life. He’d finally told her about the knife, but not what led up to it. He wouldn’t want her to know all that. She stood and approached him with an ache of regret. What she’d done was far worse than his walking into her bedroom. If she felt intruded on, how did he feel? “I’m sorry, sugar.” She tried to put her hands on his shoulders from behind, but he dodged her. “Jamie?”
“Jesus. Can’t believe I’m saying this—but,” he faced her, leaning his back against the wall beside the doorway, “I don’t want you to touch me. I think you’re going to—read my mind or something. Look in my past. And, fuck, my past, my life—” He shook his head, seeming to try to get free of something.
What would he think if he knew she had done this? “I’m sorry, sugar, really. I won’t do anything like that again.”
“Promise?”
“I do.”
“I do.” He grinned and hugged her, holding tight. “Like the sound of that.”
Mae stepped back from his embrace, hoping he was joking about the I do. “One minute you don’t trust me, and the next minute you want to marry me? I hope you know that’s hard to figure out.”
“Nah, not if you get to know me.” Giving her a quick flash of the gold-toothed grin, he walked to the counter and refilled his coffee. “Typhoon Jamie, blowing through.”
To Mae’s amazement, Jamie sat back down to breakfast in good spirits, and urged her to do the same. His small talk ranged from silly to interesting, bouncing around art and music and cooking and local lore and jokes, so the meal passed pleasantly, with no requirement for Mae to say much at all until they were done.
“Thanks for breakfast, even if you did barge in. Why don’t you come back a little before we need to leave for Ruth Smyth’s opening—”
“But this is your art day.”
“I can do that on my own.”
“Nah, I’m your tour guide. Tour guide and chef. I’ve got a whole list of galleries for you to see. It’ll take all day, and we still won’t have seen everything. You can tell me if I pick the right places, like, how I do with your taste in art.” He closed the last cabinet and hung up the dish towel. “Anyway, it’s our last day. You don’t want to send me off, do you?”
Our last day? Like they were a couple? Mae searched for an answer, and realized her silence had answered already.
Jamie looked at his feet. “Fuck. I’m begging. Or insisting. Something. Sorry.” He unrolled his sleeves slowly, watching his hands. “But ... I saw your little corn maiden and I thought you’d like certain galleries, maybe, y’know, Native artists, so I planned those ... I won’t whine again.” He met her eyes, turned on fifty percent luminosity of The Smile. “All sunshine, I promise.”
She surrendered. What else could she do? She wanted to see more galleries, she did like Native American art, and Jamie knew where to go. On top of that, she felt as if she owed him something, some kind of atonement for her secret intrusions into his past. For the hurt she could not avoid giving him, whether it came tonight or tomorrow, now or later. “All right, be my guide. But—”
“Got it. You don’t need to hammer me with it.”
“You know what I was gonna say?”
Keeping his eyes locked with hers, he mimed taking his heart from his chest and putting it in his mouth, and then stopped and put it back. Like a kid caught about to sneak a cookie. He raised his eyebrows and dropped his chin, giving her a funny but pointed look. No words needed. Ironically, his manner of accepting of her rejection made her want to hug him.
As soon as they were halfway out the front door, he signaled a stop. “Sorry. Have to get something out of the van. Leave the house open.” They went back through the house and garden to the carport. Jamie unlocked the van and clambered through from the front seats into its cargo area, muttering a longer than usual string of cuss words.
“You all right?” Mae asked.
“Bloody backpack spilled, I’ll be fossicking around under everything for a year. Fuck. Need my toothbrush. Wish I’d left that spare I used in your bathroom. Idiot. Took it with me ...”
She was rather glad he wasn’t keeping a toothbrush in her bathroom, but he was taking a long time looking for one. “Do you have to do that right now?”
“Come on, you’re at home, you got to brush your teeth. Imagine if you couldn’t. Fucking tofu sticks. You wouldn’t think that, but it does. Looks like tartar from hell. I told you my fears, remember? The dentist, and stuff in my teeth. Real fears, love. Real fears.”
More amused than annoyed, she stepped into the van’s open front door and watched him. His vehicle had looked bad at night, but seen in daylight, it was like someone’s worst closet. Cardboard boxes. Books. The bike, still bent, not in the shop to be fixed. A laundry basket with neatly folded clean clothes, a bottle of detergent. A Whole Foods paper bag full of something—she couldn’t see into it. The didgeridoo, mostly hidden by a blanket. A lightweight sleeping bag and what looked like a small ultra-light tent folded up. A one-eared faded stuffed toy kangaroo, possibly red once, threadbare with a lifetime of use, perched in the passenger seat as if it was going for a ride.
Mae picked it up. “This your driving buddy?”
Jamie glanced around from his digging and searching. “My roo?” He smiled. “Yeah. Goes everywhere with me. You like him? Had him since I was three.”
Mae was embarrassed, though Jamie wasn’t. She set the toy down, trying to not picture him giving the roo a little squeeze for comfort as he drove along, while the van coughed and stalled and begged him to check its engine.
Reaching between a box and the laundry basket, he came up with a toothbrush that wore a plastic cap, and floss and toothpaste. Then, scattered along the van and slipped into spaces between larger objects, he located shampoo, hair conditioner, razors, and deodorant. He repacked his backpack, double-checked its fastening and set it down. “Must not have buckled it right. Sorry. Back in a flash.”
Mae got out, and Jamie followed, jogging back into the house with his dental care items. While he attended to his fears and hygiene, she sat in the garden, massaging her tight calf muscles in preparation for a day of walking and standing. She could almost think Jamie lived out of the van, except he hardly ever drove it. He had those keys, too, and he’d baked a cake. But to look at what he carried—no, he’d been to the fitness center for a swim, of course he had his personal care things, and he was frankly neurotic about teeth, so he’d carry a toothbrush everywhere. He might be stressed for money, but he wasn’t living in his van. Yet. She wondered how close to the brink he was and if Wendy would have work for him in time to spare him that fate.
Chapter Twenty
Jamie took her first to a gallery featuring the work of Native glass sculptors. Mae was fascinated by the modern versions of traditional masks, glowing with color and light. “How’d I do?” he asked, hovering a little too close. “This the sort of stuff you like?”
“I love it, it’s beautiful.”
She walked on to another display, making some space between them. He was being so sweet and thoughtful and yet so exhaustingly attentive, she didn’t know how to handle him. Or herself. If only she could put him on hold for a year and then see how she felt.
“If you were staying longer, I’d take you out to Museum Hill. Pretty place, has the Indian art, the folk art. You’d like that.”
She let the suggestion fade away. Staying longer was out of the question.
“Doing all right?” Jamie asked. “How are your legs?”
“Sore, but if I stop and stretch a lot I’m all right.”
He came closer than she wanted again. “Need a massage?”
“No, thank you. You did a wonderful job last night, but not now.” They were in an art gallery. What was he thinking? He gave her a wounded look as if he’d really meant to sit her down and rub her legs again, repeating his great success in taking care of her. “Come on, sugar. Don’t look at me like that.” She felt guilty. He’d meant well, even if his sense of appropriate behavior was a little off. “How’s your hip?”
“Full of metal. Fucked up. Hurts like a bastard.” He folded his arms and scuffed irritably at the floor. “Bloody hell, I live with it, y’know?” He laughed softly. “Couple of old farts. Listen to us.” Shrinking his posture to suggest old age, he put on a squinty expression and a creaky voice. “How are your aches and pains, dear?” Grinning, he let out the snort-laugh. “I bet you’ll still be beautiful when you’re old.” He tilted his head and studied Mae with a wistful look. “Hair’ll turn sort of pink, get the white in with the red ...”