Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

by Babette de Jongh

  “Hey—” they both said at once. He was about to say Hey, I’ve got to go, but he’d been taught to be a gentleman, so he motioned for her to speak first.

  “You want to come for dinner tonight?”

  Terrible, bad idea. He should say no. Keep his distance. “Sure.” Being a friendly neighbor was one thing; getting to know the neighbor was another thing entirely. He could still come up with an excuse. “I’d love to come. What time?”

  * * *

  Wolf paced the water’s edge, then the fringes of the tall grass. Afraid to go either way, he whimpered. His side burned with every breath, but he couldn’t stop panting in fear.

  Where had the creature gone? Wolf had tumbled into the water, and by the time he’d climbed out, the creature had abandoned his pursuit and disappeared. Was it waiting for him in the water, or hiding in the marsh? Trembling with indecision, Wolf let out an involuntary howl.

  The thing growled again.

  It was in the marsh. Hiding, but not from Wolf. Hiding from something bigger and more terrifying than itself. A loud roar echoed across the water, even louder than the creature’s bellow. The loud roar became a high-pitched vibrating whine that hurt Wolf’s sensitive ears. He yelped, turning in confusion. Which direction was safe?

  The roaring whine flew toward him over the water like a bullet. Like a car. Like a truck. But it floated on top of the surface, then skimmed over the sand, landing halfway on the bank and halfway in the water. He knew he should hide, so he backed up to the tall grass where the creature hid, but he didn’t step into it.

  The people in the bullet water-car made whooping sounds like the bad kids he’d heard at the farm earlier today. He watched the people who might hurt him, but he listened for the sound of the creature who had tried to eat him.

  “Whoa!” one of the men yelled. “Look over there! It’s a wolf!”

  Afraid to move in either direction, Wolf cowered.

  Another man leaped into the water and splashed onto the shore, moving toward Wolf with purpose. “It’s not a wolf; it’s a dog. He’s hurt.”

  One of the women squealed. “Get back in the boat, you idiot. Do you want to get bitten?”

  “Probably belongs to somebody,” someone else said.

  But the man kept coming. Bending low, he held out a hand and talked in a soothing voice. “Come here, puppy.”

  The name Puppy sounded different when this man said it than when Abby had. Abby’s voice had been soft with compassion. This man’s voice held a different vibration; he genuinely wanted to help, but also had an ulterior motive.

  Wolf shivered with indecision.

  But a rustling sound in the reeds behind him made up his mind. He stood on shaky legs, the wound in his side flaming.

  The man looked back at the—what had the woman said?—boat. “Somebody bring me a rope or something.”

  Wolf didn’t understand all of the man’s words. He had learned some of the sound patterns that humans used, along with their meanings. That knowledge, combined with his ability to understand human thoughts and intentions, gave Wolf a more complete understanding of the nuances of human language.

  He understood that this man’s intention was to get Wolf into the boat. Whether the man’s motivations proved to be good or evil, Wolf’s best option was to go with him, away from the certain death that awaited in the marsh or the uncertain potential of escape into the choppy brown water.

  Decision made, he leaned briefly against the man’s side, then walked toward the boat. At the bank he hesitated, but the man picked him up and carried him, then dumped him inside. Wolf fell, landing hard on his injured side. He scrambled to get upright and quickly found a place to hide under an empty seat. People sat in all the others, talking above the loud music that seemed to be coming from everywhere. They all seemed content to drink beer and ignore Wolf.

  All except one.

  “Dude!” The biggest man—the alpha—swatted a towel at Wolf. “He’s getting mud all over my boat. And blood, too! Ugh.”

  “Fuck you,” Dude said. The word was ugly, but he said it in a bored, disinterested tone. He pushed the boat away from the bank, then hopped inside and sat in the seat under which Wolf hid. “I’ll wash your damn boat. This dog’s a wolf hybrid. He’s probably worth a lot of money.”

  Wolf understood only three words of that exchange. Fuck meant “I don’t like you.” Wash meant “bath,” a horrible punishment he’d only received once. Boat, he had just learned, was the rocking vehicle he sat in now. But he knew something more important than the words he understood. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that the man who had saved him from the creature with the wooden skin was a bad man.

  As soon as he could, Wolf had to get away.

  The boat rumbled and roared, rocketing backward then forward with frightening speed. Wolf closed his eyes—and tried to close his ears, too—until the boat came to a rocking halt in the churned-up waves.

  The driver maneuvered the boat close to a rippled concrete bank, and someone else hopped out and sloshed through the water to the shore. The man sitting above Wolf held onto him by the scruff. Wolf sat still and submissive; he could break the man’s hold, unless they decided to put a rope around his neck.

  Another motor rumbled, and a truck backed almost into the water. Then the driver drove the boat onto a wheeled frame that pulled it onto dry land. People stood up inside the boat, gathering items and chattering.

  Dude stood, releasing Wolf just long enough to bend down and pick him up. Wolf lunged away and shot through the tangle of bare legs to the side of the boat. Amid all the screaming and yelling, he leaped out.

  * * *

  Abby dressed for dinner in a soft jersey sundress with a flowery print and a flirty skirt that swirled around her thighs when she moved. Her damp hair would probably frizz, and her cheeks would be too shiny, so hopefully the cute dress would provide a distraction from the total picture.

  Because when faced with the realization that she had time to either clean the house or dry her hair and put on makeup, she’d opted for the house. While she zipped around barefoot with the vacuum, while she cleaned the kitchen and dusted the furniture and wiped down the butcher-block countertops, she told herself she’d made the right choice.

  Quinn had seen her without makeup, so that cat was out of the bag. The cat still inside its bag was the one that could’ve spilled the secret that Abby wasn’t exactly a neat freak. After three days of not picking up after herself, she had to admit that Reva’s house was beginning to look a little grim.

  She’d just put away the vacuum and lit a few good-smelling candles on the table when Quinn tapped on the glass door.

  Dressed in oh-Mama-fitting jeans and a Lord-help-me-fitting T-shirt, Quinn also had a charming grin on his face and a bottle of red wine in his hand.

  She might have fallen just a little bit in love before she even opened the door. “Hey, you’re right on time.” She grabbed ahold of one of his bare, superfine biceps and dragged him over the threshold. She couldn’t seem to help herself; anxiety had fluttered up from nowhere and urged her to get the greetings over with.

  “Come on in.” She released his yummy, warm arm and stepped back to close the door. “So glad you could come. Hope you like…um…” For a second, she forgot what she’d already prepared and put into the preheated oven. Then Georgia reached up with her front paws and propped them on Quinn’s thighs, saving Abby from her anxious downhill spiral. She took a calming breath, and her brain came back online. “Hope you like baked salmon and asparagus with roasted potatoes.”

  “That sounds wonderful.” He bent down and petted Georgia’s head with one hand and gave Abby the bottle of wine with the other.

  She took the bottle into the kitchen and hunted for the corkscrew. “Thanks for the wine.” She pulled out another drawer. “I don’t know where…”

  Quinn s
traightened and stepped into the kitchen. “Can I help you with anything?”

  Georgia followed, staying close to invite handouts or hugs, should anyone offer.

  “Nope, nope, it’s all done. I just can’t find… Oh, wait.” She yanked open the door of the still-running dishwasher and waited for the cloud of hot steam to clear. Then she reached in and grabbed the hot metal implement that had eluded her. “Corkscrew’s in the dishwasher.” She closed the door and fiddled with the control buttons. A sudden attack of nerves made her clumsy. “How do you restart…?”

  “Um… Abby?” Quinn leaned against the opposite counter, his hands in his pockets. “I’ll figure out the dishwasher in a second. But first, can you come over here?”

  She laid the corkscrew aside and turned to Quinn. His blue eyes were just as steamy as the foggy mushroom cloud that had just escaped the dishwasher. “I’m sorry… What?”

  He took one hand out of his pocket and crooked a come-here finger. “I’ll help you with the dishwasher. I want to help you with something else first, though.”

  “Um…” She licked her lips and stepped closer. “Like what?”

  “You seem a little nervous,” he said, still motioning with that come-here finger. “Let me see if I can help with that.”

  While Abby stood there distracted by his beckoning finger, Quinn wrapped his other arm around her waist and pulled her close. “You don’t need to be nervous with me,” he whispered, his mouth just inches from hers. He trailed that finger from her chin, down her neck, along her collarbone. He gently pushed aside the thin braided strap of her sundress to bare her shoulder. Goose bumps erupted along her arms as he explored her skin with that one questing finger. “Nice dress. And I especially approve of your choice of footwear.”

  She leaned in to him, her lips a breath away from touching his. “I’m barefooted,” she managed to say.

  He chuckled. “My point exactly.” His breath smelled like mint and his smooth skin smelled like cheap bar soap, almost aggressively clean. His warm lips closed over hers…

  And he was right. All the jagged energy of anxiety that had been zipping around inside her melted away like warm candle wax.

  Then Georgia barked outside, and Abby jumped. “I’d better go check what’s going on out there.”

  With a satisfied smirk of a grin, Quinn slowly slid the strap of Abby’s sundress back up onto her shoulder. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll restart the dishwasher.”

  * * *

  Wolf woke in complete darkness. The smell of his friend Georgia lingered in the leaves beside his nose. The wound in his side stung as if he was being attacked by a nest-full of angry, stinging hornets. His mouth, even his body, felt hot and dry. He needed water.

  He staggered to his feet and stumbled toward the road’s edge; maybe some dew had collected on the grass.

  He spotted a flash of red in the cloud-dimmed moonlight; a bucket of water next to a pie pan full of dog food in the place where Abby had been feeding him. Wolf gratefully lapped up as much water as he could hold, then scarfed down the food. Replete but still in pain, he thought of Georgia’s insistence that he should come to the farm and ask for help—or had that been a fever dream?

  No. It had been real. She’d said the gate to the farm would be left open, and it was, the black-painted metal gleaming dully in the dark. Wolf wanted help. He needed help. But something held him back. He wanted to deserve help, not just to ask for it without giving anything back. He limped across the darkened street and looked down the drive toward the farmhouse.

  What could he do to help Abby so maybe she would want to help him, too, even more than she already had? He’d been taught tricks that made his family happy. He knew sit, stay, bark, and no bark. He knew shake, leave it, and no, stop! He knew bang-bang, which always came with a hand signal that mimicked a shooting gun, something the alpha’s friends liked to do in the field behind the house.

  When the alpha gave the bang-bang command, Wolf would fling himself to the ground and roll to his back, paws in the air. Then he’d close his eyes and let his tongue loll, and lie very still while the alpha’s friends laughed and laughed.

  But he couldn’t do bang-bang for Abby if she didn’t give him the signal, and she wouldn’t know about that. It was something only the alpha and his friends knew about. None of Wolf’s tricks would work unless Abby asked him to do them first.

  The moon floated out from behind the shredded clouds, and Wolf noticed something lying in the driveway: a dew-wet roll of paper, the same kind he’d been taught to bring to the alpha’s wife every morning. She liked to cut the paper into little squares that she kept inside a leather bag. She took the bag with the paper squares inside it everywhere she went, so Wolf knew that the work he did in bringing the paper was important and appreciated.

  This paper had been run over and smashed flat many times. The alpha’s wife liked her papers to be smooth and dry, with leafy sheets that crinkled. This mass of waterlogged paper had fused into a wet lump. But who knew why people liked the things they liked, and whether Abby would prefer her paper dry, the way the alpha’s wife had, or whether she liked a soggy and soft roll like this one.

  Wolf, himself, preferred the soggy and soft kind; they felt squishy and bubbly in his mouth, while the dry kind had a sharp taste that made his tongue prickle. Wolf picked up the roll of paper, holding it gently so it wouldn’t fall apart. He limped down the driveway, taking short steps so the wound in his side didn’t hurt so much.

  The windows in the front of the house were dark, but the ones that faced the pool all radiated light. He crept onto the back patio, worried that Abby would see him in the circle of lights that illuminated the salty pool’s blue waters. But she didn’t notice him; she and the sad man were standing in the kitchen, so close together that they looked like they were trying to become one big person.

  Wolf padded as close to the entryway as he dared, close enough to smell the comings and goings of many feet, and laid the long lump of paper there. In the morning when Abby found the paper, maybe then she’d be happy, and maybe then she would decide that Wolf was worthy to receive more than the generous offerings of food and water she had already given him.

  He didn’t hope to belong, or to be part of the family, as Georgia was. But he did hope that at least the next time Abby saw him, she wouldn’t chase him away.

  Wolf wondered where Georgia was, and as if his thoughts had called to hers, she ran through a small, flap-covered opening in one of the doors. She gave a happy barroo and danced on her back legs, licking at Wolf’s mouth.

  He backed up. “Shhh. Don’t warn the humans that I’m here.”

  But it was too late. At Georgia’s happy yodel, the humans sprang apart and looked out the big windows that filled an entire wall from the floor almost to the ceiling.

  Wolf ran into the safety of darkness.

  Chapter 8

  First thing Monday morning, Abby opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside—onto a wet, smashed wad of newsprint that squelched under her bare foot. “What on earth?”

  Georgia sniffed the paper with great interest.

  “Did you do this?” Abby asked the dog.

  Georgia continued to sniff the paper. Then, making some sort of decision, she threw herself shoulder down onto the squishy mass and rolled, just once, before hopping up and shaking herself.

  “Little dog,” Abby said, “why you do the things you do is a mystery.”

  You’re a mystery to me, too. The words popped into Abby’s head. She looked down at Georgia, who was giving Abby an intense stare.

  Abby laughed and reached down to pet Georgia. “You’re right, I’m sure. Sometimes, I’m a mystery to myself.”

  Of course, Abby knew that the words she’d thought of were just as likely to be her imagination as any message Georgia was trying to relay, but whatever. It was fun to play the game of pretend that she
might know what Georgia was thinking. Reva would be proud. After all the years she’d spent encouraging Abby to at least consider the possibility that she could communicate telepathically with animals, she might finally be getting the hang of it. “Just play with it,” Reva had said. “Don’t make everything so bloody serious.”

  Even as a child, Abby hadn’t really known how to play, when everything in her life at home was bloody serious. No wonder she’d always been plagued by anxiety. Like a cloud, it had always hovered just above her head, and even when it drifted away a bit, it remained close enough for her to see in her peripheral vision. When she left Blair, it became debilitating, paralyzing. She second-guessed everything she did, every decision she made.

  Yesterday evening, when she was with Quinn, the cloud had disappeared completely the moment his lips met hers. But she had no business using a man as self-medication for a disorder she should learn to manage for herself. Her mother had done that and lost her identity.

  Abby had vowed not to make the same mistake. She had pinned her hopes on Blair and the ready-made family he promised, but he turned out to be as self-centered, self-involved, and self-indulgent as Abby’s father. She had felt like such a loser, asking her parents to take her in when her entire world imploded, demolished by her own hand in a weak moment of wine-fueled anger.

  Drinking box wine while scrubbing lipstick stains from her live-in lover’s boxer shorts had proven to be as effective for burning bridges as a lit torch. Forgetting for the moment that she had no legal claim on Blair’s daughter, she had thrown the damp, stain-treated shorts in her lover’s face. And with that one, satisfying splat, she had literally thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

  Because Blair had never let her see Emily after that.

  Abby knew she’d made the right decision in leaving, but her heart twisted at the thought of Emily going through rounds and rounds and rounds of well-meaning stepmothers who always left in the end.

  “Animals are better than people.” They didn’t lie or obfuscate or use their children as bait to attract the next unwary victim. “I’ll stick with animals from now on.” Abby tossed the flattened newspaper into the recycle bin and took the phone out onto the patio to call the vet’s office and make an afternoon appointment for the new kitten. The kitten hadn’t suffered from a few days’ wait. In fact, she had become more settled and trusting, so the upcoming ordeal would be less stressful.