Sweet Everlasting

by Patricia Gaffney

  When Carrie looked blank, Spring said, “Oh, didn’t you know? Wayne’s Crossing is about to acquire another new doctor. Do you think this means our little village is finally coming into the twentieth century after all?” She laughed the tinkly laugh. “Daddy’s doing some legal work for him before he gets here. His name is James Perry, he’s from Richmond, and he has three children and a wife named Maria.”

  “He did his residency at Bellevue Hospital,” Ty added, “and he’ll be here by the end of the month. He’s buying the old Jansson house on Wing Street.”

  Spring looked put out because Ty knew more gossip than she did. “Daddy says he sounds very bright. I hope he doesn’t take too many of your patients away, Dr. Wilkes,” she said archly, batting her eyelashes.

  “Me, too. If he did, I might have to lower my fees.”

  She finally said good-bye, shaking Tyler’s hand—he never had sat down—and giving Carrie a wave. As soon as she was gone, Carrie scribbled worriedly, Might Dr. Perry really take your patients away?

  “I hope so,” he said, spooning a big bite of applesauce.

  But—don’t you care?

  “He’s welcome to as many as he can handle, the sooner the better.” She looked at him quizzically. “The town’s long overdue for another doctor, Carrie,” he explained. “We could really use three. My work load’s always been too much for one man.” He added more softly, “Especially since it’s not what I want to do anyway.”

  She nodded in sympathy. He wanted to be an “epidemiologist,” which was someone who studied diseases and thought up ways to cure them. That was certainly a “noble calling,” as Spring would say, but Carrie couldn’t help thinking it would also be a shame, because Ty was so good with people. Everybody in town thought the world of him.

  Mr. Bridgers, the town undertaker and furniture upholsterer, was a perfect example. Tyler paid the check, and he and Carrie were on their way out of Pennicle’s when Mr. Bridgers, who was coming in, grabbed him by the arm and started pounding him on the back. “Dr. Wilkes! Just the man I wanted to see. You know those pills you give me for that bladder problem I was having? They worked like a charm. Lemme tell you—”

  Carrie moved off down the street a ways to give them more privacy, not that Mr. Bridgers seemed to want it. The mannequin in the window of Kline’s Ready-to-Wear caught her eye, and she drifted over toward it. She was staring at the rose-colored dress on the mannequin, trying to imagine the kind of life a woman who wore a dress like that would lead, and then trying to picture herself wearing the dress, when she saw Eugene Starkey’s reflection looming up behind her. She whipped around just before he reached for her shoulder to turn her.

  “Hey, Carrie, I thought it was you. What’re you doing in town so late? “He grinned as if he was glad to see her, and she smiled back, pleased to see him. “I’ve been in a meeting for the last two hours,” he said importantly. “Yeah, the work never stops. All the foremen and assistant foremen get together once a month, see, to talk about problems on the job. I had to give the shop superintendent a report on the turning department. Yeah, he said we’re doing great, we’re eleven percent above production from this time last year.”

  She made an amazed, congratulatory face.

  “Yeah. So.” He put his hand on the glass behind her and leaned against it, bringing their faces close. “So how’ve you been? Good, good. Me, I’ve been fine. So listen, what are you doing next Sunday? Want to go on a picnic? Some of the boys at work are going up to High Rock for the afternoon. The girls make the food, and the guys bring the beer,” he grinned humorously. “What do you say?”

  She said no, as politely as she could, in a rather long, explanatory note in her notebook.

  “Aw, come on,” he wheedled when he’d read it, bracing his hand on the window again and bending over her. “Sunday’s your day of rest, ain’t it? You need to get out some or you’ll turn peculiar, up there on Dreamy with nobody for company except old Artemis. Anybody’d go crazy living with that lunatic. Come on, Carrie, let’s have some fun.”

  She shook her head again, looking regretful and apologetic. Footsteps sounded behind her. Eugene looked past her shoulder and straightened up, and a second later Tyler joined them.

  “Hello, Eugene,” he said pleasantly, coming to stand beside Carrie.

  She could tell the instant Eugene realized they were together, because his face closed up and his dark eyes turned cold and hard. “Oh, hey, don’t let me keep you,” he said in a slow, sarcastic voice. “You two have a real nice evening.” He turned on his heel and stalked off down the sidewalk, stiff-legged and tight-shouldered. But for once, Carrie thought he looked more hurt than angry. The idea troubled her all the way to Ty’s house.

  “No emergencies—we’re in luck.”

  Carrie nodded, peering through the dusk at the blank message board on Tyler’s office door.

  “Do you want to come upstairs and have something to drink?” he invited. “We can sit on the back porch and watch the fireflies.”

  “That sounds perfect.” The perfect end, she mused as they walked around the flagstone path to the back of his house, to a perfect day.

  Louie greeted them with a lot of joyful barking and ecstatic rolling around on his back. He was still an adolescent and he didn’t have much dignity yet, but Carrie thought he showed a lot of promise. He lay with his chin on her shoe as she sat beside Ty in one of the kitchen chairs they brought out onto his back porch. They sipped lemonade in peaceful silence, staring off at the dipping, rising, winking lights in the trees across the way, listening to the katydids and the crickets. But Carrie’s thoughts kept going back again and again to Eugene, and once she sighed so heavily, Tyler asked her what she was thinking about.

  “Eugene,” she answered readily.

  He grunted. “What about him?”

  “He asked me to go on a picnic with him. I said I couldn’t, and I think I hurt his feelings.”

  He’d taken his coat off and loosened his Windsor tie; he had his feet up on the railing, his hands folded over his stomach. She loved to see him at ease like this. Sometimes the fact that she was actually one of his personal friends, someone he spent free time with on purpose, struck her as too good to be true. It was the sort of thing so much more likely to happen to someone else, not Carrie Wiggins. “I’ll take your word for it that Eugene’s got feelings to hurt,” he said dryly.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, no, Ty, he’s very sensitive.”

  He looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything for a while. “You’re fond of him, aren’t you?” he finally asked her.

  “Yes. In a way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … he’s not really a bad person.”

  “Probably not. But I think there must be more to it than that.”

  How clever he was; she wondered what it would be like to try to keep a secret from him. “There’s another reason,” she said slowly, “something that happened a long time ago. I’ve never told anybody.” There was a long, long pause, while they both waited to see what she would decide. “I’ll tell you if you like,” she offered in the end.

  “Do you want to?”

  He was making it her choice, not trying to talk her into anything. “Yes, I do want to. But …”

  “But?”

  “It’s embarrassing to say it out loud.”

  He reached across the little bit of space between them, offering his hand. “Don’t look at me, then,” he suggested. “Look off up there and say it to the lightning bugs and the tree frogs.”

  She could do that. She put her hand in his, and the wide warmth of it comforted her. She could tell Ty this. She loved him—he was her best friend. And he wouldn’t think less of her afterward.

  Still, he was right about it being easier to look straight ahead, not at him. “It happened three years ago,” she began, her voice soft to accommodate the quiet night and the story she had to tell. “I was fifteen and Eugene was a little older, but he was still in my gra
de at school. Some of the kids used to laugh at me, you know, because I couldn’t talk, and—Eugene was one of them. He was one of the worst, to tell you the truth. He was the one who first started calling me ‘dummy,’ and after that they almost all did.

  “It wasn’t too bad,” she rushed on, leery of Ty’s pity when his palm tightened around hers. “I just got farther and farther away from people and kept to myself, and then I was all right. “She risked a glance; what she could see of his profile in the dimness was stony and grim. “Anyway, one day I was walking home from school. When I got to the bridge at the bottom of Dreamy, I saw two boys I didn’t know—older boys, they worked at the mill, I think—standing at the other end. I didn’t see them till I was in the middle. I stopped, and they started coming toward me, walking very slowly and snickering to each other in a nervous, nasty way. Well,” she tried to laugh, “I knew they were going to do something to me. I turned around to run, but Eugene had come up behind me and he was blocking the other end of the bridge. They’d all been waiting for me.”

  She took a drink of lemonade and set her glass down on the porch floor. Without knowing she was going to, she got up all of a sudden, letting Ty’s hand go, and went to stand by the railing, not facing him but not quite turning her back on him. She hadn’t expected it to be this hard to say. Why was it? It was an old, old memory, she hardly ever thought about it anymore. She should’ve just said it all at once, not set the scene and told it like a story, because all the feelings of fear and shame were coming back, and she was afraid she might cry.

  “So.” She had to swallow to clear her throat. “They caught me. In the middle of the bridge. Eugene said, ‘Hold her,’ and one got my arms behind me and held me still, and the other one started—he—opened my dress and touched me, my—” She put her hand on her chest. “I was crying, but they just laughed and kept saying, ‘Why don’t you scream, dummy, why don’t you scream?’ ”

  She heard Ty get up, and a second later she felt his big hands on her shoulders. “Eugene was behind the one who was touching me. It was him I kept begging—with my eyes—to please, please make them stop.” She took a quick swipe at her eyes. “And he did. He stopped smiling all of a sudden, and the meanness went out of his face. He made them quit, Ty. He said, ‘Come on, leave her be, she’s just a kid.’ He was the leader, so finally they did what he said. And that’s the end, that’s all there was to it.”

  Tyler’s arms came all the way around her, and she leaned back against his hard, solid chest. “After that, Eugene stopped teasing me at school,” she finished quietly. “Started calling me Carrie instead of—the other name. Pretty soon, the others did, too. Things got much, much better after that, and I knew I had him to thank for it.”

  She couldn’t have been more surprised when Ty swore—softly, under his breath, but she could hear the vulgar words clearly. He bent his head so their cheeks were touching, her right and his left. He still had his arms around her, locked together beneath her breasts. The need to burst into tears went away slowly, and after a while she didn’t feel anything except safe.

  “Carrie,” he murmured against her hair, “what can I say to you? I’m sorry you were hurt.”

  “But it’s all right now. It’s all in the past, Ty, I don’t think about it.”

  He sighed. “Stoneman told me a long time ago you were too good for this world. I think he was right.”

  She laughed softly, tickled.

  He gave her a gentle, impatient shake. “Eugene brutalized you. How can you just forget that?”

  “I’ll never forget it. But he changed his mind, he did something good, not bad. And ever since then—it’s not that he watches out for me, it’s more that he’s—aware of me. He’s a part of my life, Ty. Whatever happens to either one of us, we’ll always … Oh, I don’t know the words to explain it.”

  They stood still, looking down at their twined arms and feeling each other’s soft breathing. Louie got up suddenly, toenails loud on the wood floor, and ran down the steps to investigate something only he could hear. Carrie thought Ty would let her go now, now that he knew she was all right. But he didn’t. She could feel his breath in the curve between her shoulder and her neck, and a second later she felt his lips there. She stopped breathing, to savor it. She hadn’t let herself hope for this. Just a comfort kiss, though, that’s all it was. She closed her eyes and tried not to tremble when his lips glided so slowly across her skin, coming to rest in the sensitive spot behind her ear. But she gasped when she felt his tongue there. And shivered when he said, “Honeysuckle,” in a breathy whisper.

  “No,” she finally remembered to say. “Rose petals. You must … you must need another olfactory bouquet.”

  He laughed, a warm explosion on her throat, and turned her around. “Is that what I need?” She held still, didn’t lift her hands to touch his face, even though she was longing to. He stroked a finger across her lips, urging them apart with gentle pressure, and lowered his mouth to hers for a long, slow, sweet kiss. He let his hands drift into her hair, combing it with his fingers; the raspy sound of his touch on her scalp blended with a whispery roar in her ears, and she thought that must be what desire sounded like. She didn’t move, didn’t move, but she let the pleasure flow all the way through her, like rain filling up a barrel.

  “What’s wrong?” he whispered, trying to read her face in the dim starlight. “Are you thinking about what happened, what those boys did?”

  “No. When you kiss me I can’t think about anything,” she answered truthfully.

  He smiled. Her heart stuttered. His hands on her waist tightened and relaxed, and then he slid them around to her back and pulled her closer. His mouth came down again. She couldn’t help it, she opened her lips so that he could kiss her the way he had before, that day on the mountain.

  He sleeked his warm tongue in, and somehow he managed to whisper her name and stroke her inside her mouth at the same time, like a painter with a soft, wet brush. His mouth tasted like sugar, like lemon candy. Her blood flowed thin and hot, and her muscles felt weak and powerful, leaden and weightless, all at the same time. Everything he did made her want more, and what she wanted now was the feel of his hands on her breasts. But still she didn’t move, didn’t let him know how completely she was his, because then he would stop.

  “Carrie?” he urged, taking soft sips of her lips, holding her face between his palms as if he treasured her. One of his hands coasted down her neck, her chest, his fingers playing in the hollow of her collarbone. Slow heat burned where he touched her so deftly, little circles lower and lower. Then he caught her bottom lip between his teeth, to hold her still while his fingers gently pinched the tight tip of her breast. Live sparks shot through her. She swayed, forced back a moan. The porch railing creaked when she leaned against it. Ty reached behind her and pressed his hand against her bottom, pulling her up tight against him, and everything she wanted narrowed and focused and became one thing: to join with him in an act of love.

  I love you, she told him, with everything except her voice. He muttered something, maybe her name again, and undid the top button of her dress. He fumbled with the second one; she could feel his impatience through his fingers.

  Then he took a deep breath and held still.

  “Don’t stop.” She whispered it so softly, she could barely hear the words herself. Part of her hoped he hadn’t heard them either, because they were so forward. But most of all she hoped he wouldn’t say he was sorry, because if he did she would cry.

  What he said was, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Oh, Ty, you couldn’t. How could you?”

  “Easily.” He was whispering, too, his forehead resting against hers. It was easier to talk, she guessed, if they couldn’t see each other’s eyes.

  “Nothing you could ever do could hurt me,” she said bravely, wishing it was true.

  “Sweet Carrie. You’re so young.”

  “I’m almost nineteen.”

  “I’m almost twenty-nine.�
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  “That’s not so much.” She wished she hadn’t said that, too, because it wasn’t dignified to argue. “Is that what it is? That you think I’m too young?”

  “Partly.”

  She didn’t have the courage to ask what the other part was. A terrible confession was welling up inside, filling her chest like a balloon. “Is it … are you … careful with me because you think I’m a maid?” He didn’t answer. “I’m not.” Her cheeks flamed; she felt glad for the darkness. “I’m not. … So … you wouldn’t be the first. If you wanted me.”

  He didn’t move and he didn’t say a word. Aghast, she listened to the echo of what she’d just told him; the longer the silence between them lasted, the harder it got to believe she’d really said it.

  She stepped away, breaking contact. “Don’t hate me, Ty, I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Never.”

  “But you’re surprised. Aren’t you?” He couldn’t deny that. “And—disappointed.”

  “No, of course not. It’s none of my business.”

  She rubbed her arms, which were suddenly as cold as if she’d stuck them in ice water. “No, it’s not.” She started backing up.

  He put his hand out to stop her. She flinched and kept moving, started down the stairs.

  He caught her on the third step. “Wait—Are you leaving? Carrie, I’m—”

  “I really have to go,” she cried, before he could say the hateful word.

  “No, wait, listen to me.”

  “I know what you’ll say already. I’m all right, Ty, I’m fine, you didn’t hurt my feelings. I have to go home now, so please let go of my arm.” He did, and she clattered down the rest of the steps.

  But he followed. He didn’t touch her again, but he moved fast to get in front of her and block her way. “Don’t go. Please. I hate it when you run away from me like this.”

  “I’m not running.”

  “Then stay and talk to me.”

  “Sometime outside—in a field someday, in the sunshine—” She wasn’t making any sense. With a great effort, she made her voice sound very calm. “I wouldn’t say things the right way if we talked now,” she explained. “But you were right, Ty, I am none of your business, and I have to think about everything before I can see you again.”