"You think we'll have the power back by Monday?"
"The end-of-the-month accounts are due Tuesday morning." He drained his glass and set it on the edge of the table. "They'll get power back on Monday if they have to hook us up to five hundred hamsters on a treadmill."
"Let's write up a hamster proposal and give to the power company," she said. "It beats the system they've got now."
He stayed a few minutes longer, outlining the agenda for the coming week and detailing how Sandra figured in it. She listened carefully, aware of the intimacy created by the darkness and thankful for the two women waiting for him outside and the fact that she had left the front door open wide.
At the door she shuddered at the bizarre tangle of fallen trees that blocked both her path and driveway.
"I think I'm going back to Sioux Falls," she muttered. "This mess will take me a month to clean up."
"Forget about the mess. Worry about the ledger sheets."
"Easy for you to say. You live in a condo with a maintenance crew."
"You wound me, Patterson. I promised I'd get someone out here to dig you out, and I'm a man of my word. Just get to the damned ledger sheets and leave the rest to me."
She wandered around the house for a good half hour after the Lincoln eased its way back down her street, lighting candles and trying to banish the darkness.
Darkness was where the old memories lived.
She'd give half of her stock options to be able to turn on all of the lamps and blare the TV at top volume so it reached every room, every corner, of the house.
It was the only way she knew to keep the bone-deep loneliness at bay.
She sat back down at her desk and gave it a valiant try, but the fiscal solvency of the mortgage department couldn't compete with the way Michael McKay had looked when he pulled her into his arms.
She poured herself another glass of wine and stretched out on the sofa. It wasn't a night to be alone with memories. The candlelight was too seductive, the sound of the rain lashing against her windows too reminiscent of old movies and the romantic fantasies of a simpler time.
A woman couldn't protect herself against the old heartaches on a night like this. She should get up and force herself back to her desk, to her work, to her own life. She could stop this rush back into memory with just the blink of an eye if she wanted to.
But, oh God, the way it had felt to be in his arms again . . .
#
It is a summer's night back in the days when birth control was hard to come by and the consequences of love were high.
A slender young blond girl and a lanky dark-haired boy are sprawled out on a faded yellow-and-white patchwork quilt on a small, precious patch of grassy park in the middle of New York City. Although they are in full view of anyone who might happen to pass by, at the moment they are completely, utterly alone.
She is lying on her back on the rumpled blanket, and sharp blades of grass tickle her ear. The smell of the damp earth and his breath delight her. All she can hear is the far-off city traffic and the quickened pounding of their hearts. Her white cotton blouse is open, her bra unhooked and pushed aside. The night breeze against her breasts excites her, but it is nothing compared to the touch of his hand.
In two years, this is the first time they've managed to be so completely alone.
City kids of their generation seldom have cars, so privacy is hard to come by. Cars and drive-in movies are the sole property of rich kids on Long Island who don't understand subways and buses and necking in the balcony of the Elmwood Movie Theater away from the usher's treacherous flashlight.
All summer they've planned for this night. They've outgrown the groping in the dark and the long kisses that once were enough. What they want is to take off all of their clothes, to feel the thrill of bare skin against bare skin, to see all that their imaginations had conjured up in the heat of a summer's night.
She lets her hands slide beneath his shirt and touch the muscles that are beginning to shape the body of a boy soon to be a man. He's on top of her, moving against her in a slow, insistent rhythm, and it takes all her willpower to keep her hips from answering that rhythm. It is getting harder to remember why the boundary lines are so important.
"Michael," she whispers as his hand slides down to her midriff and unsnaps the waistband of her Wranglers. "I'm scared. I'm afraid we won't stop in time…" Her voice trails off into a sigh as his hand slides under the elastic of her panties.
"I love you, Sandy." His fingers brush over the thick tangle of curls and begin to tease her. "I swear I'd never hurt you."
This is Michael who is speaking, Michael who has held her when she cried, who has seen her through braces and broken bones, the one person who knows all there is to know about her.
She knows he would never hurt her. He is incapable of hurting her. It is her own darker impulses that scare her. She is her mother's daughter, after all, and prone to making her mother's mistakes.
Elinor Patterson had believed a young man just like Michael eighteen years ago. A young man who had taken the first train out when, terrified and alone, she'd told him she was pregnant with their child.
Elinor's life had been changed forever by the baby forming inside her teenaged body; her life had changed in ways that Sandra knew she herself could never survive.
The work. The worry. The unending, unyielding secrets and shame that had yet to become a part of society's past.
Not for Sandra.
Never for Sandra.
But without his clothes Michael seems younger, more vulnerable, except for the part of him that terrifies and fascinates her and makes her want to throw caution to the four winds.
"Just close, Sandy," he whispers. "We won't really do it, just get as close as we can."
"What if I get pregnant?" Her voice is husky, not her voice at all. "My mother would blame herself. I couldn't –"
"I wouldn't run like your father did." His fingers slip inside her, and she gasps with pleasure at this sudden, overpowering sensation. "We would just get married sooner than we planned."
"But my scholarship, your education . . . We couldn't –"
"We could," he says. "We can do anything."
But Sandra is old before her time, the daughter of a woman who had been made the same promise and believed it, only to be left with a child when she was little more than a child herself.
Michael believes they can handle anything life has to offer. They're invincible, he says, destined to see only the sweet side of fate. He's a product of the times, certain that everything they touch will turn to gold.
"Believe me," he says. "Believe me."
And this time she wants to believe, even though she knows she shouldn't.
She's yearning toward him, opening for him, forgetting her fears and ambitions and letting the one she loves more than life –
It was the lightning that did it.
One bolt of lightning with incredibly rotten timing hit a tree in Sandra's front yard and sent it crashing into the birdbath.
No matter how tightly she kept her eyes closed, how ardently she tried to recapture the dream, it was irretrievably gone.
She sat up on the sofa and let her surroundings come back into focus. The candles burning low on the end tables. The plush white carpeting. The lustrous mahogany furniture that had cost her a fortune.
The sound of a second hurricane approaching the Island.
No sultry summer night. No scent of wet grass and wildflowers. No rumble of city traffic. And, oh God, no one to hold her, no one to love her, no one who understood one single thing about who she was and where she'd come from.
How ironic that, even in her dreams, she and Michael McKay hadn't quite managed to make things work out.
And how ironic that even now, more than fifteen years later, just the memory of his touch was enough to make her wonder why she'd ever said no.
~~
Chapter Three~~
"Hurricane Iris is twenty miles south-southeast of
Long Island and moving toward shore at. . . " The battery-operated radio faded, and Sandra gave it a sharp slap across its tinny face.
"Damn it!" she muttered, glaring out the window at the dark grey sky. "Why couldn't you die during the baseball scores?"
She jiggled the dial and was rewarded with another bout of static, then: "National Weather Service predicts that Iris will hit storm-battered Long Island tonight with more force than . . . "
What a thoroughly lousy day.
First that painful, evocative dream last night, and now another hurricane racing toward them. Maybe Ed was right; she should have stayed in Sioux Falls.
They didn't have hurricanes in Sioux Falls.
And they didn't have Michael McKay.
Michael had filled her dreams the way he'd filled her life. Ridiculous that an idiotic teenage love affair, one that had never even been consummated, could figure so prominently in her thoughts.
She got up to boil water for coffee, then caught herself as she was about to turn on the stove. So much for the modern, all-electric household; if the power company didn't get the electricity back on soon, she'd end up having to use her furniture for firewood.
How many times in the last twenty-four hours had she flicked on a light switch, then cursed the darkness, or popped a tape into the VCR only to stare at a dead screen?
She opened the dark refrigerator instead, and pulled out a warm container of orange juice.
No wonder she was so jumpy and irritable. It had nothing to do with Michael and all those bittersweet memories filled with adolescent angst and forgotten dreams.
Who wouldn't be jumpy if they were suddenly plucked out of the late twentieth century and plunged back into the Dark Ages?
She had a living room without a roof, a driveway completely blocked by fallen trees, a pile of paperwork that had to be done by Monday morning, and another hurricane on its way to send her and her house flying toward Oz.
She took a sip of the warm orange juice, and then poured it down the sink.
She was going back to bed.
#
The sky had been dark all morning, an evil, mean-spirited grey that was enough to depress the most stubborn of optimists.
When Michael awoke and saw it, he was pleased.
He welcomed the approaching storm. He wanted thunder and lightning and turbulence, because they matched the wild emotions he'd been struggling with since seeing Sandra the night before.
After calling David to let him know he was still all right and that the swing set in the yard was still standing, he pulled on a sweatshirt and his old standby jeans with the hole in the left knee and went out to pitch in with the ongoing neighborhood cleanup.
The euphoria of the night before had disappeared with daylight as Michael had expected. Most of these men breathed fresh air only from the safety of their golf carts and redwood decks. They were upper-middle-class professionals who had Lawn-Rite manicure their yards and kept the plumber on retainer. This return to nature was more than they could handle.
They kept up an easygoing banter while they worked, and it was almost enough to keep Michael's mind from straying toward thoughts of Sandy.
Around two o'clock the wind blew harder, the strong gusts held on longer. When the sky suddenly turned from grey to a peculiar mustard color, everyone stopped.
"She's on her way," Jim Flannery said, looking up at a nasty cloud formation that seemed to be settling in over the North Shore.
"It's going to be a bitch of a storm," said Sid Bernstein, shaking his head. "I hope the generator holds up." The hospital Sid was affiliated with was running on an auxiliary generator.
"We still haven't hacked our way out of Henry yet," said Frank, heaving a branch of weeping willow onto the huge pile of firewood to the right of his driveway. "How much more can we take?"
"Not a hell of a lot," said Michael, glancing at the huge trees still standing. "I think we'd better start battening down the hatches before it hits."
"Maybe it'll pass us by." Ever the psychologist, Bill made a practice of seeing the bright side of dark situations. "What are the odds on getting hit by back-to-back hurricanes?"
A blast of wind knocked them back on their heels.
"About even money." Michael rested the axe handle on his shoulder and turned toward the house. "You guys can stand out here and say hello to Iris. This time I'm going to tape my windows."
"Don't think your luck will hold a second time, McKay?" Jim asked.
"Let's say I'm not going to take any chances."
"Two hours later all twenty-three windows were covered with giant masking tape X's in keeping with National Weather Service instructions. His house was as hurricane-proof as it was going to get, which was a good thing, since there was damned little doubt that Iris was on her way.
Despite the wind that seemed to intensify with every passing minute, an eerie stillness pervaded the neighborhood. Birds had disappeared; Jim Flannery's cat sat howling on the front step until Jim let her inside. Michael could see Sid's Labrador retriever racing in circles in the Bernsteins' driveway.
He knew what the animals were feeling. He could sense the storm in his bones and in his muscles. His scalp tingled with the electricity in the air. He welcomed it.
While he didn't wish any more destruction on the already badly battered Island, he want4ed to drive down to the beach and stand out in the middle of the hurricane and let the wind and the rain and the lightning do their damnedest to wipe Sandra Patterson out of his mind.
He grabbed his car keys from the kitchen counter and was gone before any of his friends could tell him he had finally gone over the edge.
He already knew that he had.
#
Under normal circumstances, Sandra Patterson never cried.
However, being expected to survive two major hurricanes within as many days was more than any man or woman should be required to bear. Hurricane Henry hadn't been so terrible. It had been daylight, after all, and there was a certain novelty involved in spending a Friday morning watching all hell break loose outside your living-room window.
Watching all hell break loose right outside your living-room window when you had no electricity, no running water, no heat and no telephone was another story entirely.
The thrill was gone.
Iris had conveniently managed to stall right off the Jersey Shore for a while that afternoon, building up force and giving day plenty of time to turn into night before she struck Long Island.
And strike Long Island she did.
Sandra had been so cavalier in refusing her neighbors' invitations yesterday that no one had bothered to reissue one today, and she regretted her haste. Pride was one thing, but survival was something else again. If her nearest neighbors weren't so far away, she would offer herself up on their doorstep and beg for shelter.
At least she knew her mother was all right. The storms had headed across the Sound and over Connecticut. New York's Westchester County hadn't been touched.
Another blast of wind rocked the house, and she burrowed deeper into her sweater. Any lingering urge to brave the elements disappeared in a burst of sanity. Only a lunatic would go out there, where trees snapped like matchsticks and picnic tables flew through the air as if they were made of papier-mache.
For the thousandth time her mind returned to thoughts of Michael. He used to love storms, the brilliant flashes of lightning, the terrifying crack of thunder.
Once he had borrowed a friend's car and taken her out to Jones Beach, past the city and into the coveted suburbs of Long Island. He wanted to know how it felt to be in the eye of a storm, and she had crazily stood with him on the boardwalk as all hell broke loose around them and the Atlantic Ocean crashed at their feet.
His boyish sweetness had disappeared, and she had watched, mesmerized, as he seemed to gather strength from nature's violence and she glimpsed the man he was to be.
In her darker moments, it was a memory she returned to again and again.
The reality of Michael the man was not one that disappointed.
The radio crackled on again in a burst of Beethoven. She prayed for something rousing enough and beautiful enough to banish memory.
The reception, however, was horrible, a mass of tinny crackles and loud booms. She couldn't remember ever hearing that particular thump of percussion in that movement.
A piano interlude followed.
The thump recurred.
Sandra jumped up, spilling the apple juice she'd found in the pantry earlier. Someone was at the back door.
She knew full well that Ed Gregory would never risk his neck in a hurricane to keep her company, and for all her neighbors knew, she'd gone to stay with friends. The houses in the sub-division were so far apart and so well-hidden by clever landscaping, that she could be held hostage for ten days and no one would even know.
The room was almost dark; one small candle burned on the end table. The thump turned into an insistent banging that matched the pounding of the pulse in her throat. She picked up the baseball bat she'd found earlier in one of the unpacked crates in the garage and headed for the front door.
"Who is it?"
A crack of thunder drowned out the voice.
"I can't hear you," she yelled. "Speak louder!"
Wind and rain battled for dominance, but over it all she heard a man's voice. "Sandy?"
Michael?
She opened the door. He stood there on the top step, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunched against the rain. He wore a dark leather jacket with the collar turned up, and for a moment they were young again when they were just beginning to fall in love.
"What are you doing here?" After all these years he was there once again on her doorstep.
"Are you going to ask me in?"
"I'm not sure."
A wicked blast of wind sent a flowerpot full of impatiens sailing across the front yard.
He held his hands out, palms up. "I'm unarmed."
She struggled to snap her mind back into gear and stepped aside so he could come into the foyer.
Second Harmony Page 4
