Mistress of the Runes

by Andrews

  “If there’s no time or distance, then we have no ancestors,” I said in a rather condescending tone, irritated at her and the museum for losing track of the painting.

  “Unless we are our own ancestors!” she chirped. “Suppose every historical age is like a large theatrical production, and all of life is happening under a big tent, many tents, and the performances are going on simultaneously. We don’t think so, because we can’t see out of our own tent.

  “But just occasionally, someone lifts the flap and escapes and raises a flap on another tent and looks in, and perhaps sees a show with different costumes, but the script is universal: it’s about love and lust and loss and success and failure.”

  I felt like I was in college again, only this time on drugs. I stopped and whirled on her. “I was in a painting that was on your wall! A painting made centuries ago. So how was I able to be the red-bearded warrior on horseback from centuries ago and also be me, Brice Chandler, today?” If this woman wanted to play psychological games, let her deal with that.

  “Maybe the soul has so much energy that it multitasks?” she said, undeterred by my tone.

  “Well, a lot of multitasking has obviously taken place, because my friend was with me in that painting.”

  “Sounds as if she’s more than a friend, in that case.” The woman smiled benevolently.

  How does she know my friend is a she? I wondered, but focused instead on our debate. “I admit, what you propose in your simultaneous performances all under different tents does skip a lot of death and dying. The downside would be that when we die simultaneously, that’s the end of everyone, forever.”

  “Or it means that we never die…the show always goes on!” She grinned impishly, apparently delighted at having stirred me up. “You have so many questions, and you will find the answers. Never stop seeking the answers.”

  I looked at her as if she’d lost her mind and decided to speed-dial Liz and tell her about the painting. The answering machine message began, so I hung up and turned back to the docent, but she was gone. Where did she go? For someone who seemed elderly and frail she could appear and disappear faster than anyone I’d ever seen. I hit redial and this time when Liz answered, I told her about the entire bizarre experience.

  “It was you,” I said breathlessly.

  “So you and I were together in another lifetime and we’re together again.” A long pause. “Come home to me, Brice,” she said, not seeming to care about the painting, but only about us.

  “I can’t. I mean…” I let out a long sigh. “Just because I think you look like a woman in a painting…we can’t have a relationship based on that.”

  Another pause. I knew that I’d stepped over the line in the offhanded way I’d dismissed her.

  “Then I won’t keep bothering you about it,” she said quietly. “I believe in living life fully and embracing love completely, Brice. I believe this is our sign. Have you thought about that? Have you thought about us together at all?”

  I heard her struggling with the next few words, then I thought she might be crying. The line went dead.

  I went dead. How can I be this old and be this goddamned confused? Not confused, conflicted. All right, scared. Scared and tired. Tired of starting over.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was in L.A. for the remainder of the week in meetings, but I managed to get home Friday night, a full twenty-four hours early. By Saturday morning, despite the rainy weather, I wanted to see my horse, and I wanted to see Liz. We’d planned to go to the barn together on Sunday, but I decided to stop by and see if she would change her plans and go early.

  I whipped into her driveway and set the parking brake in one swift motion, then jumped out to find Liz standing on her front porch with a woman who was leaning against the porch rail in what looked like an ownership stance, her leg up on the step, her body draped over the banister. Who the hell’s that? Cocky stance like she thinks she owns the building and everyone in it, I thought.

  She wore spike heels and a tight skirt, and her body was buffed like she worked out. She certainly didn’t own the house, so my guess was she thought she owned Liz. As I was trying to unravel that thought, Liz caught sight of me over the woman’s shoulder. The woman started to leave, then turned back and planted a very long, deep kiss on Liz’s lips, waved, and jumped in her car and drove away.

  Liz walked slowly down the steps toward me as my heart sank, and I realized of course the woman had most likely spent the night with Liz. My mind replayed my surprising Clare by coming home early from a trip, and now here it was again.

  “Hi!” Liz said, seemingly unembarrassed. “Sorry, I would have introduced you.”

  “No need. We didn’t have an appointment. Tomorrow’s our day. I just had the urge to go out to the barn and thought I’d stop by and see…but you’re busy, so we’ll do it tomorrow as planned.”

  “I’ve just started seeing someone,” she said softly. “She’s been asking me out for a while, and I’ve said no.”

  “Well, looks like yes to me.”

  “I need to fill in some blanks for you so you can stop judging me, which I’m pretty sure you’re doing.”

  I could have landed right in the middle of that remark with a few of my own, but I decided silence might serve me better at this point because I was too hurt and too angry to really formulate my thoughts. So I let Liz have the floor.

  “After my college roommate, I haven’t had any real relationships with women and damned few with men. That’s why no one in town knows I’m gay—because I barely know. Recently I got into therapy and finally figured out that I like the way women look, smell, and feel, but obviously not just any women because I’m wasting my time on you. I have to quit that. I need to make my life happen, Brice, instead of letting life happen to me. I can’t wait any longer.”

  “Then it wasn’t worth waiting for. What does she do?”

  “Owns a construction firm.”

  “So did she…add onto your bedroom?” I said lightly, but with dark intent.

  “Actually, she hasn’t worked on my house. But she’s not afraid to have a relationship, which is a real plus when you’re attracted to someone,” Liz said, adding her own false brightness.

  “Well, congratulations!” I headed back to the car.

  “Hold on, I’m going with you!” Liz dashed up the porch steps, grabbed her purse and keys off the hall table, and locked the front door, getting into the car with me before I had time to protest. Nearly volcanic, I slammed the gearshift into reverse and barreled out of the driveway, ignoring pedestrians in my path.

  “Careful! You’re getting really close to people!” Liz warned.

  “Apparently not!”

  “Brice, you can’t have it both ways.” Her voice was quiet.

  “I never said I wanted to have it at all,” I bit back at her.

  “That’s precisely my point. You can’t begrudge someone else finding pleasure in someone you’ve decided you don’t want.”

  Lightning suddenly crashed down around our car in jagged streaks as we drove; it was so close and so loud that my heart jumped involuntarily as I raced through the storm in silence.

  Twenty-five silent minutes later, I punched our code in at Paula’s farm gate, careening down the elegant drive toward the barn. There in the large south paddock Hlatur and Rune, drenched, lightning crashing around them, were running up and down the pasture by the fence, squealing to one another in obvious stark terror.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted, and we jumped out of the car and grabbed the halters off their stall doors like relay runners. We were inside the pasture in seconds, but the horses had worked themselves up into such a frenzy we couldn’t reason with them. They were running away from us, not to us. Our panic, and my residual anger, apparently made us appear to be in the same dilemma they were, and they weren’t following people more crazed than themselves. A horse trait that executives should master, I thought.

  In a matter of seconds we were soaked throu
gh to our skin, our hair matted, and our voices barely audible above the thunder and lightning.

  “Don’t touch the metal building!” Liz screamed as lightning struck nearby.

  “Rune!” I called. “Rune, here, girl, come on!” I called again as Rune circled me, her head held high, her whinnying sounding more like a scream with every new lightning strike.

  “We can’t stay here!” Liz screamed to me. “We’re going to be hit!”

  At that very moment, Rune passed close enough for me to get my hand on her mane, and I grabbed it firmly, with authority, and said calmly, “Whoa, easy, easy, easy…” As I slipped the halter over her head I could see her shoulders and sides shaking. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  The lightning strike of all lightning strikes slammed out of the heavens and pierced the ground a few feet from us. I couldn’t see for a second but heard Liz scream again and thought she’d been hit. My heart almost leapt out of my chest. She was crying. I knew, in her hysteria, she would never be able to catch Hlatur; their fear would feed off each other.

  “Take Rune inside and get her in her stall. I’ll get Hlatur.”

  “No!”

  “I need you to get her out of here. Go! We’re right behind you.”

  Liz jogged off in the rain with Rune in tow. Hlatur and I, of course, were not behind her. He took one look at me and bolted, in an apparent terror fit at seeing his mare leave him. The thunderclaps were coming in waves. I trailed after Hlatur, trying to seem nonchalant, as nonchalant as a person can be in a lightning storm. I was sodden, and my clothes were so heavy they were difficult to move in.

  The pasture was a rectangular three acres. The horse and I were up at the narrow, western end of the pasture, nearest the barn, but all the horse had to do was turn east and take off and I would have to cover the seemingly endless span of ground on foot to get him, and most likely never would. I stopped chasing him.

  “Hlatur, come on. I’m going to get you out of this storm. Come on, boy. Come on.” I moved slowly toward him and he snorted, whirled, and ran. I approached again, trying to focus only on the ground around him and not look him in the eye, ignoring the raging waters and lightning strikes. “Hlatur, come here.” I crouched down, as I’d been taught, to look uninterested and less threatening.

  Another lightning strike and he took off. The light was intense and terrifying; the hair stood up on my neck. It struck so close to me that my legs were shaking. I held my arms out and tried to wave him into a corner. Liz had nearly lost Hlatur to peritonitis, and now if this crazy horse got hit by lightning or died from pneumonia I didn’t know what she’d do, but I’d seen lightning kill horses and cattle, and I didn’t want it killing us both.

  The more I intensified my efforts to get him, the more he intensified his efforts to avoid me. A double whammy of lightning bolts hit so close to me that I felt the electricity in the air and a tingling sensation ripple through my ears.

  “Damn it, horse, I’m leaving you! I’m not going to get killed for you, and you’re going to die if you keep this shit up!” I turned and ran toward the gate. As I put my hand on the latch, I felt a heavy breath on my shoulder, then Hlatur’s head and soft wet lips pressed up against my ear. Of course! I thought. The only thing a herd animal fears more than being caught is being deserted by the herd; and I’m the last of the herd in this field.

  “Good choice, guy.” I slid his halter on and slapped the strap over the top of his head and through the buckle. Liz was crossing the arena at a jog when I entered with Hlatur in tow.

  “Oh, my God, you’re my hero!”

  Liz had an endearing little-girl quality that surfaced on those rare occasions when she was upset and had been rescued all in the same moment, and to hear that I was a “hero” made me laugh in spite of the conditions.

  “The lightning was horrendous, and I was leaving him when he caught up with me.”

  “Oh, Hlatur, you could have been killed.”

  She hugged his big neck, then flung herself on mine. She feels so damn good pressed up against me, I could fucking faint if I weren’t ready to kill her for sleeping with that bitch. I broke away to put Hlatur in his stall, then the two of us stood shivering, her arm around me, staring out of the barn doors into the raging darkness. I didn’t want her ever standing like this with anyone else. In fact, I wanted to murder anyone who ever tried to stand with her like this. And if I thought about that woman kissing her on the porch, I could go insane.

  Floie, the barn manager, came dashing into the barn from her interior barn apartment. “Oh, wow, I had no idea it was raining! I was taking a bath.”

  I stared at this vapid girl who was now all pressed and perfumed while I, the person paying hundreds of dollars a month to have my horse cared for, stood soaking wet and freezing cold, my life just recently in peril.

  From past experience, Liz knew an eruption on my part was entirely possible, and she didn’t want harsh words with a barn manager who could mistreat our horses in order to get back at us, not an uncommon cowboy trick. She pinched me, warning me to think before I spoke, so I paused to carefully phrase my response.

  “You shouldn’t take a bath while it’s lightning. If the lightning had struck a plumbing pipe, you would have been killed.” I smiled as if the idea were a pleasant one. “By the way, the horses are terrified of lightning, because it’s rare in Iceland, so it would be great if, the next time it storms, you could either grab them in advance or call us so we can get here in time.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, missing the point.

  I kissed the horses and sloshed out to the car, sneezing along the way. “I can’t go on like this. I need my own ranch.” I sneezed again.

  “You’re not getting sick, are you?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  “Let’s get you some Nyquil. You need a good night’s sleep.”

  *

  “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Go back to your construction worker,” I said as we sloshed through Walgreens picking up a few over-the-counter cold remedies. I no longer cared that I looked like a drowned rat. I was depressed and tired and obviously coming down with something.

  At the checkout counter the jovial clerk who rang us up sang out, “How you ladies doing this evening?”

  “Fine, thanks,” I lied flatly and handed him two twenty-dollar bills.

  “You two sisters?” He withheld our change pending an answer.

  “No,” Liz said quickly.

  “Well, you sure do look like sisters. I’d swear you were sisters.”

  I snatched the bag from him and headed for the car, leaving Liz to get the change.

  As she climbed into the car, I seethed. “Why in hell do people think we’re sisters? We look nothing alike.”

  Liz patted me in that calming way I’d patted my own hysterical mare caught in the lightning.

  “I might as well have found another guy in the store and said, ‘Hey, are you two brothers? Well, you sure do look alike.’ People should stop that are-you-two-sisters shit,” I groused.

  “He was trying to strike up a friendly conversation and didn’t know what to say.” Liz took up for him.

  “Then he should just give me my change and say nothing.” I was still fuming over Liz’s houseguest. She seems perfectly acceptable, if that’s what Liz wants in life. Someone to pick out her flooring and landscape her patio. “I don’t see what you have in common. But if it works for you, go for it!”

  “Me and the guy in the pharmacy? What are you talking about? Do you have a fever?”

  I ignored the question, because I did have a fever, and it wasn’t brought on by my cold.

  How did I get to this point? Angsting over, mooning about, and craving a woman I’ve lost! And the idea that she would just randomly pick a construction worker is unbelievable. That has to be the person she was having dinner with the night I phoned her to say the horses were ours. This has probably been going on forever…

  “Behind my
back.” The words came out accidentally.

  “That’s where it’s hurting?”

  “It hurts everywhere,” I said. And I meant it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The following Monday at precisely eleven o’clock, roughly seventy executives from various divisions of the company gathered in the corporate auditorium to lay eyes on the man who, virtually overnight and in complete stealth mode, had purchased controlling interest in A-Media. CEO Anselm Radar, or Darth Rader, as the staff had now dubbed him, bounced up to the microphone looking veritably pumped full of joy and enthusiasm.

  “This is a great day for our company! For a long time A-Media has been looking for the right partner to help us take our business to the next level, and after months of negotiations and meetings about our company’s culture and people, we have decided that Robert Baron is the man who can lead us into the next millennium!

  “Robert, as you know, doesn’t come from the entertainment world, which is a good thing.” He laughed, and a polite ripple of laughter followed in his lame-joke wake. “And he’s going to bring some much-needed strategic planning and forward thinking to this company, while cutting costs and shoring up our business units.”

  Robert Baron was a short, gray man in his mid-fifties who looked a bit like Mickey Rooney, if Mickey Rooney was having an incredible gas attack at this very moment. When he came to the microphone, Robert Baron contorted his face into several different, and completely unique, facial expressions, none of which were emotionally relevant to the moment. “Hello.” He stopped to make another gaseous expression for dramatic emphasis.

  “Before coming here to join you, I was at the NSSGA, which is the National Stone, Sand, and Gravel Association.”

  I heard two audible giggles before the audience realized Robert Baron wasn’t kidding.

  “These are the industries I’m most familiar with, so you will certainly have a lot to teach me in the coming months. Nonetheless, I think we have common ground…”