I stared at my own fingernails for a while, reassuring myself that there had been nothing casual in what Jack and I had done. Jack had asserted his devotion to the point of being almost Victorian about it, asking me almost on bended knee to be his “lady,” and would I please accompany him to the clinic for a little blood work? Talk about your delayed gratification! How times have changed, that we now prove our love by our willingness to visit professionals in white coats to check for viruses before we jump in the sack. About as sensual and spontaneous as filling out a form 1040 for the IRS, but Jack had made up for that, the very night we got our results …
The lovemaking was wonderful, yes, but physical gratification alone would not have sent me looking for him. I’m not a child any more. There was a whole lot more to Jack than just hot hokey sex. But just how much more, how painfully much more, I had yet to learn.
We met on a job, or at least he was on the job—like I said, he’s an operative with the FBI—and I was along as a volunteer. Working on a case together is a great way to get to know a guy in a hurry, although I don’t recommend some of the side effects, such as having to rig up a bulletproof vest and hope no one aims for your head, but like I say, it cuts through some of the preliminaries like a chainsaw through butter.
After the case was wrapped up, we kept seeing each other. It was all very natural. Jack came along as witness when Tom got married, and I was there for Faye. And then we’d both be there at dinner, and he’d take me skiing, and everything seemed to glide along reeeeal smoooothly. Jack wore well, as my mother used to say. He’s a big man, nicely framed and pleasantly muscled, the kind of guy who’s fun to show off to dear old Mother even if you sometimes wish she’d put her opinions where the sun never shines. He had originally been sent to Salt Lake City on loan from the head office back East, but he was a southerner by upbringing, or at least, that was what I had come to presume about him. He was not much on offering up details about himself, or his past history. He gave short answers to leading questions. Asking, “Where did you go to high school?” got me, “Down South.” I tried a few times to pump Tom Latimer for information about him, but he said little beyond, “Jack? I don’t know. But I’d trust him with my life.” So Jack was a friend for the long haul, but also a creature of the moment, and that suited me well enough that I had quit asking questions after a while.
Then one day we had been out hiking in the mountains east of Salt Lake and he sat me down on a rock next to a beautiful stream and—I’m not kidding—went down on one knee. “Em, sweet thang,” he murmured, nuzzling my hand, “will you be my lady?”
I watched the mountain breezes play though his hair. A fish broke the surface of the nearest pool, and a woodpecker jumped from one tree to the next. “I thought I kind of was,” I replied.
Remembering this, sitting in Tom and Faye’s living room, the wave of longing hit me again, so strong this time that I gasped for air. The room seemed to dissolve, and Tom and Faye looked like people outside a fish bowl staring in at me. I snapped, “How long will he be gone, Tom?”
“As I said, another week. Maybe two. Three, tops.”
I knew he was bullshitting me. He didn’t know. He was just trying to mollify me. “Where’d he go?”
Tom stared out the window. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or can’t say?” I knew he was holding back, and preferred to feel anger towards him for doing that than at Jack for having left me.
Tom’s face darkened. “I’m out of the loop, Em. I’m retired from the Bureau, remember?”
“Yeah, but he’s your pal.”
He fixed an unreadable gaze on me, said concisely, “I think that you’re closer to him than I am now.”
He was twisting my words. I could feel it in the little muscles that were tensing up all over my body. I thought, That’s not fair, but I didn’t dare open my mouth and acknowledge that his words had inflicted pain. I didn’t want to tell him about the craving I felt just to be near Jack, couldn’t tell him about the silly fantasies I had of finding out where he was and going there to be near him. It was boring sitting around waiting for him, and waiting for him to return didn’t suit my penchant for being right in the thick of the action. I kept my eyes off of Faye. She was too good at reading my mind.
But out of the corner of my eye, I saw her shift slightly on the couch. It was a subtle movement, just an odd rotation of her hip, but something in it seemed like a signal. I turned and looked at her. The expression on her face was suddenly a little too innocent. “Tom,” she said, “I’ve been thinking. It’s about time for a last trip before the baby comes. How about Em and I go down to Florida and visit my aunt? Get a little sunshine, and—”
Tom’s eyes snapped towards her. His voice hardening into a tone of warning, he said, “It’s perfectly sunny here, darling.”
I pounced. “Florida?”
Faye went into a cat stretch, pointing her long legs towards Tom. It arched her round, smooth belly outward, emphasizing the voluptuousness of her pregnancy. She fixed a smile on him that would melt butter in January. “Florida is lovely this time of year, no matter what anyone says. The humidity is good for the skin, and it rains almost every afternoon, breaking the heat. We could just hang out …”
Tom closed his eyes and pinched thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Faye, have you been listening in on my private conversations?”
She purred, “Tell her, Tom. Come on.”
Tom slammed his fist against the back of the chair. “Faye!”
I jumped in quickly lest the point of my conversation be lost in another of a long string of domestic squabbles. “Tom, you seem to have something to tell me. So tell it!”
Tom’s entire person was focused on Faye, his head down like a stalking animal. Faye shrank back into the couch, no doubt wondering how her do-gooding had gone wrong for her this time. Tom spoke from between clenched teeth, his voice a hiss. “Yes, Faye, I’d like to know myself what you have to tell us. And I’d like to know exactly how you know it!”
“It was nothing, Tom! The word ‘Florida’ was all I heard. Honest. You raised your voice for a moment while you had your head in the refrigerator to get him a beer, that was all.” Faye’s tone waxed sarcastic. “I admit I had to strain a little to hear, but aren’t you proud of me? Doesn’t that make me a good detective?”
Tom cackled viciously. “No, you are not. Your friend Em here is the detective.”
“Forensic geologist,” I interjected, still trying to knock him off his track.
Tom said, “Forensic geo-detective, Junior Woodchuck, whatever. Em, you just stay out of this. Faye, I demand to know! Have you or have you not been listening in on my private discussions?”
Faye managed to look affronted. “No. You guys were just talking—you know, having your beer before Jack took off—and I was lying down in the bedroom there minding my own business, thank you very much!” Very quickly she added, “I suppose you didn’t know I was in the house.”
“We damned well did not!”
I hollered, “Is there some good reason I can’t know where Jack is?”
Tom’s posture stiffened, which told me that until then, he hadn’t been as worked up as he’d been trying to appear. He had jumped on Faye to try to shut her up, and had continued his attack as a crude subterfuge to evade my questions. Faye seemed to have read that in him, too. She smiled brightly, a kind of girl-scout-cookie-salesperson grin meant to sell him on something he didn’t want. On Faye’s aristocratic face it looked downright goony. “That’s all I heard you say. Honest.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him.
He wiggled his graying eyebrows back.
I shifted from trying to pry Tom open to worrying that he and Faye might at any moment dash into that bedroom and get sidetracked. I roared, “Come on, Faye! If that’s all you heard Tom say, then what did Jack say?”
Faye looked from her husband to me doubtfully, then shrugged her shoulders. “Well, he said he was going to Florida.”
/>
Tom groaned.
I said, “And?”
“And something about ‘code name Dust,’ and ‘don’t tell Em, she’ll get the wrong idea.’”
I glanced at Tom. His lips twisted wildly for a moment, then he turned and stormed out of the room. I heard the back door open and slam shut. Heard a car engine start up. Heard the sound of tires squealing on blacktop as the vehicle left the curb abruptly.
I looked at Faye. We both knew that this was no act.
She stared at her belly and began to cry.
I thought of going to her and trying to comfort her, but found that I could not move. I now knew where Jack was, geographically—two thousand miles east and south—but without more information, that was just a compass direction along which to apply my longing. And now, jammed right up against that emotion, I suffered a new one, infinitely worse: the first shards of fear.
The rest of the company stood looking after it, but my curiosity being stronger, I followed it, riding close by its side, and observed its licking up, in its progress, all the dust that was under its smaller part.
—Benjamin Franklin describing a dust devil (letter to Peter Collinson), August 25, 1755.
A woman stood alone on the beach, clinging to her aloneness. The wind played games with the soft tendrils of hair that grew in random curls around her face. She took off her sandals, threaded the straps through one belt loop of her rolled-up jeans, and buckled them together so that she could run with her hands free. She stepped forward and looked down, examining her footprints.
Her name was Lucy, and she had almost majored in Anthropology in sympathy for the pre-human namesake who had long ago left tiny footprints in Africa, but Lucy had abandoned such romances of things past, telling herself that hers had become a life of the future, where few could follow her. She stood now with her own bare feet on the sands of Cape Canaveral, deep in the fastness of the Kennedy Space Center. And when the space shuttle next rose into the skies, she would rise with it, and take her first steps in space.
But that moment had not yet come, and she had first to deal with the agony of waiting through each hour and each day that hung between her and her goal. She felt eyes on her back; the eyes of the world, yes, but also other eyes, and escaping that gaze had become as much her goal as rising into space. She marked this rare moment of relative privacy by closing her eyes, so she could concentrate on the sensation of sand rubbing against her skin. It was almost like a message. But as she opened herself to this thought of pleasure, she could for an instant also perceive pain, and a bolt of it shot through her mind.
She glanced nervously over her shoulder, unable to stop herself from searching for a source for her anxiety, even though she knew it could not be there. He might track me to my native Florida, but he can’t follow me this deep into the Cape. I am safe here. Even safer in space. He can’t follow me there …
She forced her face forward again, forced herself to look normal, casual, in charge of her destiny, just out for a jog on the beach. Physical training. Dedication. Her lips stiffened and her brow tightened as she thought, I am in charge, damn it!
She closed her eyes to take this thought inward. Inhaling the salt air, she opened them again, drawing the world into a fresh register. She examined it, once again becoming the observer.
The beach stretched long and smooth down the cape, fading into the mists. She imagined it on the map in her office, the wave-sculpted beach ridge that bounded the seaward side of the barrier island, itself in turn just one section in the apron of sand that edged the pancake-flat complex of ancient sea deposits that geographers called Florida. Waves washed the beach, grinding the cast-off shells of a hundred zillion sea creatures into sand, working and rolling each grain along an endless conveyor belt that transported them slowly along the shore, perhaps one day to be the cement in a new halo of stone.
Lucy turned her face fully into the wind. The waves were big, and thirsty. They marched in from the broad Atlantic and heaved themselves up steeper and steeper as they approached the shore, like prides of lions pacing across the veldt from Mother Africa and opening their mouths to roar as they drew near.
Lucy scanned her body for tension. Arms. Fingers still clutching, as if ready to grasp a weapon. Anxiety must still be lurking within her brain. She reminded herself that she had made it to her destination. That she was in charge.
So why can’t I let go of this foolish anxiety?
Focusing her mind as she had so doggedly trained herself to do, Lucy studied one single wave as it approached, contemplated the series of circles each molecule of water described as it came, her mind’s eye now replicating the diagram on wave motion that had been in her freshman geology text. The long fetch of the Atlantic wind was a comforting surety. Just physics. Sanity. All in control. It had drawn its hand across the water’s surface, dragging it first into cat’s paws and then into swells, forming long, sensuous troughs of water that marched across the open water.
Lions? Better fifrican lions than a Florida panther, she mused. Lucy forced both images out of her mind. It’s just water, she assured herself. H-two-O. With salt. In motion. It’s all just physics.
But as she watched, the waves again became stalking lions. Lionesses, she insisted, still fighting for control of her thoughts, but even that thought betrayed her. Bewilderment turning to anger, she thought. The females do the work while the males sleep, then the sons of bitches climb on board and have themselves a good fuck!
Surprised at the scale of her anger, she blinked, trying to snap her mind back to her carefully ordered world of science, of a + b = c, of practicality. She drew in a ragged breath, let it out, the sound of it lost in the wind. Focus harder. The wave she had been watching began to rise, the lioness heaving her body into a self-sacrificing pounce. Lucy gritted her teeth, forced her mind to imagine the oscillatory circle of its individual molecules stretching into ellipses as they intersected the slope of the beach and tripped bottom. Now the axis of that ellipse flattens with the drag of the undertow, now the wave oversteepens and collapses … The chaos of tumbling water churned up the beach. More powerful than most, this wave kept coming, swept clear up to where she stood, snatched at her feet, wiping out her footprints with one jealous swipe of its paw. Lucy felt its sucking caress pull at her ankles and shuddered, her mind suddenly free of words. Tears burst from her eyes as she released herself into the tide of her emotions.
Springing into a run, Lucy dashed along the swash line, pounding a string of footprints into the sands. She ran hard, filling her lungs with salt air, raising her face to the north, drinking in the privileged privacy of this farthest reach of the Space Center. She felt her well-trained muscles respond with grace, raising her above the bonds of earth with every stride, carrying her northward with the long-shore wind. The mists clung to the waves and sand and beach ridge, almost obscuring the launch pad that towered ahead of her. Yes! This was her destiny, to rise above the Florida peninsula once and for all! As her breathing deepened rhythmically into her belly, she regarded the rocket that waited for her upon that pad: four and a half million pounds of rockets and fuel, and mounted on its side, space shuttle Endeavor, one hundred and twenty-two feet of technologically marvelous craft. It hugged its boosters like an emerging butterfly clinging to its cocoon, as if hanging there in wait for its stubby wings to pump themselves to a fuller potential. Lucy shook her head ruefully, again defying such imaginings. A butterfly’s gossamer wings would snap under the stresses of launch, she told herself. Or fry to a crisp in the heat of reentry. Better these laughable little tile-encrusted planes that protrude from Endeavor’s chubby tail!
Once again assured of her rationality, Lucy fairly flew up the beach, her hands describing the same circles as the waves, her feet making a dance with the sands, here sinking in a little deeper, there barely digging in a toe. Her mind wandered outward, keeping a ledger of observations, jotting down variations in the packing of the grains of sand—Is it the waves that determined the softnes
s and hardness, or is it also grain size, roundness, and sorting? —no matter, years of fierce training had brought her to this moment, to this opportunity.
The launch delay was agony. Some little quirk in the vast, ultra-sophisticated assemblage of machinery, called—pedantically enough—“the shuttle,” had nudged the schedule past its safe launch window. Her crew had stood like stone, each looking at the other when the word came, “Sorry, we’ll have to start offloading fuel, and with this weather coming in …” NASA was rolling back the shuttle—she could see it go, sliding dumbly along on its crawler, a butterfly not yet ready to emerge from its cocoon, creeping meekly back toward the safety of the assembly building. She had been all suited up—so close!—and the countdown had stopped and … but with luck, it would be only two weeks’ delay. Get the flaw in the machinery fixed, get these storms past, roll the shuttle back out …
Surely she could endure that much more. Two weeks before the fulfillment of her life-long dream. She, Lucy of all Lucys, would snap loose her tether to this earth, ride that rocket to the sky, the thundering pressure of five gravities pressing at her slender back like the fist of God.
In ecstasy, she arched her neck and threw her face open to the heavens. Yes, yes, yes, her feet chanted to the sands, her angry dash transformed into a swell of victory. Yes, I have made it. Yes, I have prevailed. Yes, I can do this, I can make it at last, I can rise above this ground—
A sea gull glided into her field of vision. Mottled with dark feathers. It swooped closer, eyed her coldly. An untamed corner of Lucy’s mind saw something all too familiar its primitive gaze. He sent this bird—no, worse yet, he has climbed inside the creatures of the sky! With this thought, her adrenal glands jolted their chemical stimulant into her unwitting blood stream, ramming her heart against her ribs like a trapped animal trying to escape its cage.
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