Shadow Dance

by Susan Andersen

  Tristan replaced the receiver, threw back the covers, and climbed out of bed. He rubbed his heavy morning stubble again. Two weeks. He’d better shave and hit the road. He didn’t have a lot of time.

  Amanda ignored her breakfast tray. At its best, other than being nutritionally balanced, hospital fare had little to recommend it. Besides, she wasn’t hungry.

  She was numb. In part, that could be attributed to the two white pills the nurse had given her earlier. They masked the pain from her broken arm, which still throbbed between medications. But mostly, her lack of feeling had its origin elsewhere. She counted the holes that marched in regimented lines across the acoustical ceiling and refused to analyze what that something else was. She was safer and happier if she didn’t examine it too closely. It didn’t matter, anyway, for she was content in her desensitized state. The numbness formed a shell around emotions that were too painful to face.

  Amanda pulled her gaze from the ceiling when the door swished open. She frowned. MacLaughlin stood in the doorway with a small bunch of violets bunched incongruously in his large fist.

  “How are you feeling?” He stepped into the room.

  “Fine.” She really wished he hadn’t come. Whenever he was around, her novocaine-dull state was imperiled. She didn’t want to feel, and only his presence had the power to threaten her carefully balanced emotions. She looked back up at the ceiling.

  A small frown pulled Tristan’s eyebrows together. He had hoped a good night’s sleep might restore the old Amanda, but it was the new, indifferent stranger who so studiously ignored him now. He thrust the flowers at her. “These are for you.”

  She barely glanced at them. “Thank you.”

  Tristan tried to rein in his frustration. He put the flowers in a drinking glass and splashed in some water. “When are they releasing you?”

  “After lunch,” she replied without looking at him. She wondered how to ask him to vacate her apartment. When she left here, she just wanted to go home and be alone. She didn’t want the effort of having to share anything of herself with him—with anyone.

  “My captain in Seattle called,” Tristan said. Amanda didn’t reply, and he began to worry in earnest. Her lack of response was scaring him. Hoping to shake her out of the fog of indifference that seemed to surround her, he continued, “He wants me to come back to Seattle. Right away.” Be outraged, Mandy. Please. Say it’s too soon. Demand that I stay.

  Amanda felt an undefined emotion agitate for attention deep inside, and she firmly stamped it out. “I think that’s a good idea,” she stated agreeably. “I was going to ask you to move out of my apartment anyway. This simplifies matters.”

  Tristan felt as if she’d gut-punched him. “This simplifies nothing!” He braced his hands on either side of her hips on the hospital bed, towering over her with angry frustration. He didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish, but she sat quietly without reaction. That was the whole bloody problem. She didn’t react to him at all. She just sat there and patiently waited for him to leave her alone. He felt the optimism with which he had left the apartment shrivel and die. All the moisture deserted his mouth, and he licked his lips with a tongue gone dry. Slowly, he straightened.

  “I love you,” he said, and he realized he was pleading. It was a new experience for him, but this was too important for him to let pride stand in the way. “I want to marry you.”

  Amanda flinched. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “We could make it work!”

  She didn’t point out that his job was in Seattle, while her work tied her to Reno. She knew him well enough to realize he would somehow work around those obstacles, and she didn’t want him to do that. She wanted him to leave her and her deadened emotions alone. Instead, her reply was short, to the point, and utterly final. “No.”

  Tristan leaned over and kissed her with a desperation that pushed her head back into the pillows. Her mouth beneath his remained cool and unresponsive. Finally, he straightened and stood looking down at her, breathing heavily. His skin itched; his stomach was jagged with raging nerves; and a rampant thirst burned like the Mojave in his throat. He also felt perilously close to tears—a condition he hadn’t experienced since he was eight or nine years old.

  “You’re safe now, Amanda Rose,” he assured her, hoping against hope that hearing the words would make her accept the truth of them. “Dean Eggars is dead, and he’ll not be hurting you or anyone else ever again.” She looked at him without blinking, and he exhaled wearily. “Ah, lass, dinna let him steal your life away even in death. That’d be giving the bugger power he doesn’t deserve.”

  Tristan’s words beat at something deep inside her, so Amanda deliberately scrambled them in her mind until they were nonsensical. She watched him without expression, and when he showed no signs of giving up, she sighed. “Go away, MacLaughlin. Please.”

  Tristan’s determination caved in and he sighed also. “Aye. I’ll leave. I’m going back to Seattle.” His eyes met hers, and they were silver with the intensity of his emotions. “When you discover your safe little world is a lonely one, I want you to come get me. I’ll leave an address with Rhonda, and lass, I’ll be waiting as long as it takes.” He walked to the door, then paused. Without turning back to her, he said to the door, “Take care of Ace for me.”

  Then he was gone.

  Amanda resumed counting the holes in the ceiling. When Rhonda picked her up, she thought she’d ask her to stop on the way home so she could pick up a new nightgown.

  A nice cotton one.

  Chapter

  20

  Rhonda looked at Amanda in her prim white cotton nightie as she sat on the couch watching television. She was watching a game show—game show, for the love of God! Amanda, who hardly watched TV at all, aside from the news and an occasional videotaped episode of West Wing, was staring at this mindless pap for all the world as if she found it fascinating. It didn’t even have the distinction of being one of the intelligent ones that demanded a bit of thinking in order for a contestant to get anywhere.

  Disgusted, Rhonda walked over and snapped the set off. Amanda just blinked at her with blank patience. Seeing Amanda’s bright, inquisitive mind suspended in a deliberate state of limbo made something in Rhonda snap.

  She had been patient, dammit. She’d waited for Amanda to emerge from her fog. She hadn’t pushed. She had bitten her tongue while she’d watched Amanda pack away all of her pretty new silk and satin bits of lingerie and climb into those damn Victorian cotton shrouds she’d taken to wearing. Rhonda had even let her avoid the subject of Tristan when the poor man was eating his heart out for her up in Seattle.

  Well, no more. Amanda wasn’t making the slightest effort to get back to normal on her own, and watching her vegetate in front of the tube finally pushed Rhonda beyond her level of endurance.

  She stood in front of Amanda, fists planted on her shapely hips. “When do you plan to get up off your butt and get on with your life?” she demanded.

  “My life is progressing just fine,” Amanda replied calmly.

  “You call sitting around for hours, watching shit like this on television, living? Oh, that’s just dandy, Amanda. You haven’t made the slightest attempt to get your life back in order since you came home from the hospital. You’ve let yourself go. Hell, look at you! You haven’t shaved your legs in nearly a month, and your fingernails are a mess. You don’t want to see your friends; you don’t want to leave the apartment. My Gawd, never mind the screw-up of the century, which was when you sent Tristan away. He’s only the best thing that’s ever happened to you, but hey, no big deal—good men are a dime a dozen, right? That’s practically small potatoes anyhow, compared to what really scares me: since you’ve felt better, you haven’t even tried to dance!”

  Amanda shrugged, and the indifference that caused a constant veil to shutter her eyes made Rhonda furious. She bent down and scooped Ace out of Amanda’s lap and set him aside on the couch. Then, grasping Amanda’s good arm, she hauled her to h
er feet.

  Amanda wrenched her arm free, and the look that flashed across her face gave Rhonda pause. For just an instant, she caught a glimpse of the expression that must have been on Amanda’s face when she’d fought Dean Eggars for her life, and it was a frightening sight to behold. But if she simply let Amanda go back to stagnating in front of the television set, then Eggars might just as well have killed her that day, for she was dying by inches anyway. She hadn’t shown a spark of interest in anything in several weeks. Rhonda reached for Amanda’s arm once again.

  Amanda backed away. “Keep your hands to yourself, Rhonda,” she hissed angrily, and Rhonda was encouraged by the first real show of emotion Amanda had displayed. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Rhonda crooned. “We’re all supposed to tiptoe around poor Amanda, because she’s had a real scary experience. Well, I’m sorry as can be that Eggars picked you to terrorize, Mandy Rose. And I’m sorrier still that you were hurt.” She was totally sincere. She wished more than anything in the world that it hadn’t happened to Amanda. But her tone was deliberately sarcastic, and she watched the fury build in her friend’s eyes. Good. Better a show of temper than that rotten indifference. “Well, baby, at least you’re still alive. That’s one hell of an improvement over Maryanne and those other dancers. Jeez Marie, I bet they’d all spin in their graves if they could see your zombie act in those damn Victorian virgin jammies…” She tweaked the voluminous folds of Amanda’s nightgown.

  Amanda’s violet-blue eyes blazed and she snatched the material out of Rhonda’s grasp. “Better a Victorian virgin,” she retorted flatly, “than a slut.”

  It was like being blindsided out of the blue, and Rhonda shook her head as if she’d sustained an actual blow. “What?” she whispered.

  “A slut,” Amanda repeated with precise enunciation. “A woman who spreads her legs for any man to hit the horizon. Ring a bell?”

  “Are you saying that’s what I am, Amanda?” Rhonda blinked fiercely to hold back tears. “A slut?” God, Amanda had always made her feel so special. But now she was saying…

  Amanda shrugged. “If the diaphragm fits…” She examined her fingernails and frowned. They really were a mess—all ragged and dirty—and it upset her that it had been necessary to have it pointed out to her. God, if Rhonda was right about her letting herself go, then perhaps she was right about the other things she’d said also. Suddenly, the cushioning state of numbness that she had been carefully cultivating was rent in two.

  Damn you, Rhonda. Damn you! The sudden, unwelcome rush of returning feeling to her frostbitten emotions throbbed like the devil, and Amanda struck out blindly, wanting Rhonda, the cause of it, to hurt as much as she did. With calculated cruelty she said, “At least Victorian virgins know how to keep their knees together, so they don’t run the risk of contracting nasty little social infections.”

  Amanda looked up just as Rhonda was whirling away, but she was in time to see her friend’s tears overflow and splash down her cheeks. Shame and remorse slammed through her, excruciating in their intensity, and she took a step forward to apologize, to stop her friend from leaving. But before she could do so, Rhonda’s voice sliced right to the core of her and hit a vital nerve.

  “Victorian virgins don’t run risks, period. Isn’t that the point of this whole pathetic charade?” She indicated the now-dark television set, Amanda’s general scruffiness, and her messy apartment. “What a pitiful farce. Well, I hope you enjoy your chaste little world, Mandy Rose,” she said in a hoarse voice, then added flatly, “and don’t worry about Tristan. We both know what a highly sexed guy he is. I’m sure he’s found someone to replace you by now.”

  She left, closing the door quietly behind her. Amanda sank back down on the couch and buried her head in her hands. Then, for the first time since Dean Eggars had tried to kill her, she began to cry.

  Amanda wrapped a plastic produce bag around her cast and stepped into the shower, turning to keep her injured arm out of the spray. Twenty minutes later she stepped out again, scrubbed, shampooed, and shaved.

  She dried her hair, clipped and filed her fingernails, and sat down at her dressing table to apply a light coat of makeup. Then, dropping her towel to the floor, she padded naked from her dresser drawers to her closet and back to her dresser again. Finally, she turned and looked at the bed. Walking over to it, she got down on her knees and awkwardly retrieved the cardboard storage box from beneath it. Sitting back on her heels, she opened the carton cautiously.

  Looking inside was almost anticlimactic. For a moment, she just gazed at the contents within. Then she pulled out a pair of ice-blue satin panties and the matching chemise that rested on top of the stack of lingerie in the box. After donning the underwear, she carried the rest over to the dresser and pulled open her lingerie drawer. For several moments she stood looking down at the three white, carefully folded cotton nightgowns she had purchased on the way home from the hospital.

  Then she scooped them up, dropped them on the floor, and kicked them aside with her bare foot while she refilled the empty drawer with her scraps of satin, silk, and lace.

  The hardest part of pulling her life together again, Amanda discovered, was facing what had happened that day in her apartment and learning to forgive herself for not responding to the situation with the perfect grace and style that she had been raised to project. She acknowledged that—in her case, at least—no matter how far or how fast she had tried to flee, she had never really outrun the parental dictates that were drummed into her as a child. She still hated admitting that she was far from perfect.

  She relived that day in bits and pieces as she dusted and vacuumed and did what chores she could manage with one good arm. And at first all she could think was I should have done this, or I should have done that, or If only I had…

  Well, she hadn’t. But she had survived. And if her pristine manners had become just a little bit sullied in the process, well, that was just tough shit, as MacLaughlin would say.

  Amanda went very still in the midst of chasing down dust balls along the hardwood floor under her antique sideboard. She bowed her head, leaned her chin on the wooden handle of the dust mop, and closed her eyes. Oh, God. Tristan.

  Little by little, she was coming to terms with her own human frailties. She had always been quick to forgive the sins of others; she now needed to learn to forgive her own. They weren’t more scarlet than anyone else’s, regardless of what Mother and Father had raised her to believe. Just because she failed to live up to their sterling standards didn’t mean she didn’t have a value of her own. She wasn’t perfect, she never would be perfect, and she was simply going to have to learn to live with that, instead of beating herself black and blue over her failure to be what nobody else was, either.

  So she was making strides, learning to accept at age twenty-eight what most people knew by the time they were five.

  But she wasn’t sure that she was ready to face the dilemma of Tristan MacLaughlin just yet. Probably the smart thing to do was just leave it well enough alone and get on with the rest of her life.

  But a secret corner of her mind wanted to know: had he found someone to replace her?

  Slowly, she began to swipe the dust mop back and forth beneath the sideboard once again. She told herself it’d probably be for the best if he had.

  But the thought hurt.

  God. It hurt so much.

  Amanda almost lost her nerve. Over the past few days, she had managed to come to terms with her own myriad faults. She had resolved heretofore unresolved feelings for her parents and her sister Teddy. Those were the toughies, so why was her nerve failing her now? But it was. And consequently, her tap on the door was administered with such a light hand, it was doubtful it could be heard three paces away. She waited a scant count of three and then turned away.

  The door behind her opened.

  Slowly, she turned around again. Rhonda stood in her doorway. “How are you?” she asked, formal as a stranger.
>
  “I’m okay…fine.” For a woman who had been trained to be poised and articulate in any situation, Amanda was at a dead loss. She hugged her plaster cast to her stomach, and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Finally, she blurted, “Rhonda, I am so sorry about those things I said to you!”

  Rhonda regarded the distressed blonde on her doorstep with dispassionate eyes. Finally, she stepped back from the doorway. “Come on in, Amanda.”

  Amanda followed her into her living room. The furnishings warmed her, for they were pure Rhonda—bright and eclectic and cluttered. She watched as Rhonda picked her cat out of an overstuffed chair and dumped him on the floor. Her expression shuttered, Rhonda glanced at Amanda over her shoulder. “Have a seat. Do you want something to drink?”

  “No.” Amanda sat down, perching uneasily on the edge of her chair. She avoided her friend’s gaze for a few heartbeats, looking down at her newly manicured fingernails instead. But finally, she looked up and met her eyes. “I didn’t mean what I said, Rhonda. I didn’t.” She tried not to cry, but her emotions had been fluctuating wildly these past few days and the tears began to fall, despite her best attempts to stem the flow. “The things you told me made me feel emotions I had been doing my damnedest to avoid feeling, and it hurt. God, it hurt so much, and I wanted to make you hurt, too.”

  There was silence in the apartment for a moment, and Amanda began to wonder if Rhonda had heard a word she said. Finally, she stirred. She looked Amanda straight in the eye and whispered fiercely, “I am not Teddy, Amanda Rose.”

  Amanda’s head jerked in shock. “What?”

  “I said, I am not your precious sister Teddy.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? Do you, really? Or have you just convinced yourself that I’m the next best thing to having her back alive? Rhonda’s an okay substitute,” she mimicked with some bitterness. “A slut, of course, and not nearly as good as Teddy was, but better than nothing.”