False Dawn

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Evan!” There was alarm in her voice as she ran to him and found him bent over the howl, his face gone from flushed to pasty. He stopped her at the door. “I’m drunk, Thea. Keep away.”

  She hesitated, then, worried, started toward him.

  “I said keep away!” The sound was like a blow and she reeled under it.

  “But why? You need help, don’t you? Evan, what’s the matter?”

  Even in his condition he could sense her concern and confusion. Slowly he wiped his mouth on one of the fresh, soft towels, and threw it down with a grimace. He sat on the edge of the tub, gesturing to her to come nearer, taking her hand when she did. “I wouldn’t say this to you if I were sober,” he began, making an effort to keep his words crisp. “No, don’t draw back. I won’t hurt you. My word on it. I’ll stand by my word, I promise you.” He could see she was poised to flee from him. “You’re perfectly safe. I’m not that drunk. If I were going to take you against your will, I would have done it a long time ago. I couldn’t do that to you, Thea. But…but, Thea, I’m not a stone. I know you and I want you. That’s all. I couldn’t…hurt you, Thea. I know what hurt is and I know what it does to people.” He went silent, swallowing hard several times. “All right. Maybe I don’t understand what it was like. But I wouldn’t do it, Thea.” He rubbed at his eyes as if wanting to wipe alcohol or his memories away. “It’s been almost a year since we started traveling together, since you saved my life in that silo. We’ve been through a lot together. I could not have survived without you. I would have died months ago. And now I know you, Thea. I know the kind of woman you are. I value you. I want you. I won’t lie about that.” His fingers tightened as she started to pull her hand away. “Maybe it’s not possible. Maybe there’s no way. If it isn’t possible, so be it. But promise me…” With an effort he released her hand. “Don’t say no yet. Promise me you’ll think about it.”

  She nodded, frightened, but not with the blind terror he had seen in her before. Then she was gone from the room and Evan felt himself sinking into a hopelessness that was as engulfing as night. He knew he should not have spoken to her, that she wasn’t prepared to deal with his need, and he couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t lust he felt, he told himself. Or if it was, it was only a small part of it.

  In a little while she was back, holding a cup of cold coffee out to him. “I think it helps. I remember my mom saying that once.”

  Wordlessly Evan took the cup and drank the coffee, not aware of the dreadful taste. It was much easier to drink the coffee than to talk with her, for now he was becoming more sober by the minute, and he felt the first discomforts that presaged a hangover even more acutely than he felt shame at his behavior. When the cup was empty, he handed it back to her, watching her lean, strong fingers close around it.

  The next day they explored the old stadiums and dormitories. There was a little shop filled with winter clothes and another, next to it, that displayed pretty, useless things that were for people to keep or give as mementos. “Souvenirs,” Evan explained, picking up a tiny, badly-done statue of a deer with Squaw Valley scribbled on its side. “People used to buy millions of these things.” On one rack there were faded paperback books, most of which had fallen to pieces. Beyond it, rising up against the wall, a stand with toothpaste and aspirin, shampoo and tanning lotions.

  “What did people do here? Why did they come?” Thea asked as they walked to the foot of the dilapidated ski lift.

  “Winter sports. Ice skating. Skiing. All the sports that go with winter. Hockey, downhill and cross-country skiing, ice-skating, snow-shoeing. It was fun. They came up from the Coast and the valleys and exhausted themselves in the snow. Then they went back to the cities, tanned, stretched, almost smug. I used to play hockey myself, in college.” He looked up at the mountains rising around them, to the snow that clung so tenaciously to the crags, the shaggy fringe of trees defying winter, the redness of their reddened needles reaching toward the sun like little flames. It was not a place for playing now.

  Two days later, while searching the other houses, Evan came upon a grandmother clock, a weight-driven, old-fashioned device that chimed the hours in a muffled clang when he set it running again.

  “What do you want that for?” Thea asked when Evan hauled it into the octagonal house and set it up in the main room.

  “To tell the time,” he said as if the answer were obvious.

  “But why?” she pursued, puzzled by the clock. “There’s only you and me here. What do we need a clock for?”

  He had no answer to give her, but he stubbornly insisted he had to have the clock. “I’ll figure out when it’s mid-day and I’ll set it then. It’ll make a difference. You’ll see.”

  She shrugged. “If you want to do that, go ahead,” she told him, and went to check the stock of wood in the kitchen, for the stove and the water-heater both burned a lot of wood, and she did not want to run out of heat during the night. She paid no attention to his happy preoccupation with the grandmother clock.

  The next day was cloudy, and Evan used the afternoon to look for more old-fashioned clocks. He found three of them, one a mantle-piece nautical clock that ran from a wind-up key and rang the watch hells that used to be familiar to sailors the world over, one a pendulum clock with another key, and one a novelty clock that slid down a saw. Gathering them all, he brought them back to the house in as much triumph as if he had stumbled on a trove of food or a supply of ammunition. Grinning with pride, he set them out. “As soon as we have a sunny day, I’ll set them running, and then you’ll see,” he promised her.

  “I’ll see what?” Thea looked up from the pile of blankets she had gathered from the resort and the houses and was now sorting out, setting aside those that were moth-eaten or mildewed and folding those which could still he used. She was perplexed by his plan and his satisfaction with it. “You’re going to run all of them?”

  “Of course,” he said, his enthusiasm making him a little breathless.

  “Of course,” she repeated in disbelief.

  Over the next two days, Evan carefully observed shadows at mid-day, and, finally satisfied, set his clocks to ticking, smiling at their chiming as each hour passed. Although he was yawning more than an hour before the clocks announced their various versions of ten that night, Evan stayed up, saying with a laugh that he used to be awake well past midnight.

  Thea, who had gone to her room sonic time before, heard him climb the stairs, humming to himself. She rolled over, wondering what it was about the clocks that so delighted him.

  For the next week, Evan tended his clocks with an intense devotion, taking care to make sure they all kept the same time, correcting any irregularities in their mechanical reckoning with meticulous adjustments. He made a point of announcing the time before their meals, and of staying up until ten every night, as if retiring before that hour was more than he could stand to do. “I wish I could find one of those old wind-up alarm clocks,” he confided to Thea at the start of his second week of time-keeping.

  She shook her head. “You wake up at sunrise, don’t you?”

  “Usually,” he allowed.

  “Would the alarm be any better? Your habit’s pretty reliable.” She was genuinely confused.

  “No,” he decided aloud. “But I miss hearing an alarm.” As he said it, he knew it was true, that the clocks were a link to the life he had had before. “I like the ticking, too.”

  Thea found the sound annoying, and the chimes and bells disrupting, hut she held her tongue, sensing that his understanding was far different than hers, “If you like it, then you like it.”

  “I do like it,” he responded, needing to defend his clocks. He continued to fuss with his clocks for another week, then, just as suddenly as he had appropriated the clocks and set them to keeping time, he abandoned them. Over the next fourteen days they ran down and fell silent.

  Finally Thea summoned up her courage and remarked, “Are you going to use the clocks any more?” They were sitting in front of t
he fireplace, the glow of the embers and half a dozen candles providing their golden illumination to their evening.

  Evan looked up from the book he had been reading. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “No. Probably not.”

  In spite of herself, she blurted out, “Why not? You wanted them so much.”

  He did not answer at once, and when he did speak, his voice was as distant as his eyes. “You were right. There’s only you and me here. What do we need clocks for?”

  Thea was astonished at the sadness she heard in this admission, and she quickly said, “I think there might be some wild sheep up near the crest. I might go try to track them.”

  “Fresh mutton would be nice.” He nodded and smiled, but his eyes remained bleak, and not because he didn’t like mutton; he could tell that they would have to move again before summer.

  But it was pleasant as the spring came on, timidly at first, and then with a fragile energy giving a kind of beauty to the place. Spindly, determined shoots of green appeared at the edges of the snow. There was a shining in the air, a freshness that not even the new pall of volcanic smoke could obscure. The streams grew their own kind of peppery watercress, and miner’s lettuce poked out of the ground, more stunted than before but still tangy and good. The days became weeks, and a month went by.

  “What about the animals?” Thea asked as she sorted out boxes of canned goods. The regular meals for the last month had taken away the tight hollows of her body; the bones that had pushed angrily at her skin were changed to sweet, angular curves that erased the brittle look she had worn for so long.

  “Too near Tahoe, probably, and too many people like us, looking for a safe place to stay,” Evan answered. He was busy cleaning a couple of small traps he had found in another house. With luck he thought he might catch something on the western ridge of the valley. He, too, had put on flesh, having now something of the indomitable solidity that had marked him once as the most respected of the classical music world’s younger general directors, shuffling the bookings of six opera companies and fifteen symphonies all over the world. He had done his job well, then, and cleaned his traps with much the same care that he had used in contract negotiations. “We can try, though. There’s been bobcat tracks by the upper creek once or twice. They’re predators, and they must be living on something.”

  “Not bobcat.” She said it with finality, seeing again the bobcat at Buck’s Lake as it sank under the ice.

  “All right. No bobcat. What about badgers?”

  She considered this, recalling all the strange meats she had eaten to stay alive; rats, when there was nothing else, and rattlesnakes. “Evan, there’s enough food to keep us going for a while, isn’t there?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Then let’s wait for a bit. Don’t put traps out yet.”

  He glanced up at her in surprise. “Thea? I thought you were the one who didn’t want to take all this for granted. You said we shouldn’t get used to living like this.”

  Half-frowning now, she made a complicated gesture. “I don’t know. It’s just that there are so few of them left. We don’t need them yet. We don’t have to kill them, do we? Not yet?”

  “No, we don’t have to. Not yet.” He gave her a gentle smile and felt himself ache for her.

  “Then put the traps away, okay, Evan?” she pleaded.

  “Okay. Until we really need them,” he promised.

  Over the next few days the smoke in the sky grew darker and occasionally the air would echo eerily with the distant sound of the volcano, the air would shudder and the ground quiver. The light grew hazily colorful, even at midday, and turned violently bright at sunset, as if the fire in the earth were reflected in the sky.

  “Why did it happen?” Thea asked as they trudged toward their house in the glow of a spectacular early-May sunset.

  “Who knows? Volcanoes have always been a puzzle. Lassen was threatening sometimes, and Shasta was a potential hazard. It was bound to happen someday. It was now rather than another time.”

  Thea looked at the vivid display in the west. “I don’t think I’d like to be any farther north. Lassen and Shasta are north of here, aren’t they? We should stay away from them.”

  Evan remembered once stopping in Iceland, when the volcanoes there were unusually active. He had seen a lava snout poke its way into a village and watched as the buildings burned like matches. “No. I wouldn’t want to be any farther north.”

  At night, seated by the fire, Evan would read to her, picking the books at random to entertain her and himself with a great variety of stories. By tacit agreement, they confined themselves to fiction, as if they had enough of reality during the day, and could find no relief from reports of actual events.

  “What’s this one about?” she would ask, handing him another book, then sit back to listen while he read. Occasionally he would have to explain some detail, for Thea knew very little history, and her knowledge of geography and politics was sketchy at best. Because much of what was in the books was strange to her, she shied away from reading aloud herself, hut was always delighted to hear him read.

  He was in the middle of Pride and Prejudice when she stopped him after one of Elizabeth’s more cutting observations, asking with a clouded face, “Did people really live like that? Spending all their time wondering about money and marriage and clothes and parties?”

  “Well,” he answered, holding his place in the book with his finger, “I guess they did, yes. This is a satire, so Austen emphasizes it, but it is pretty much the things people at that level of society worried about. It was somewhat different for the titled and landed and the wealthy, like Mr. Darcy. The poor were the way the poor always have been, and that’s outside the scope of this book. But for women like Elizabeth and her sisters, yes, their lives were fairly limited. Remember, this was two hundred years ago. And then, marriage was the most important thing in their lives, and acceptable husbands were very hard to find”

  “But all of those words and all that plotting just to have two people end up together.” She shook her head in disbelief.

  He stifled a laugh. “Yes.” To a large degree it had still been that way he was young. Some few determined and talented women had broken away from the pattern, and the resurgence of feminism had forced a few reforms in law, but even then, for most women, marriage and family were the framework for their lives. “It didn’t change a lot, and not at all in many parts of the world,” he said a moment later. “People used to get married, you know. I did.”

  She scowled at him. “Is it that important?”

  “What? Marriage?”

  “No,” she snapped. “Sex and children. Do people really care so deeply? Does it make that much of a difference?”

  There was a look in his eyes that made her turn away, wishing she could take back her questions. When he had gathered his thoughts, he answered her. “Yes, when there is time, it is that important.” Clumsily he opened the book and began to read again, but his attention had wandered from the story and he soon found an excuse to stop.

  But that night, as he lay in bed, staring at the darkness, he became angry. It had been one thing to keep to himself all those months in the cold and danger, when he could not afford to think about wanting Thea. Now that they were safe, things were different. Now, he thought bitterly, because we have time and opportunity, because we’re not starving or shot at or hunted, it is important. It is important. “It is important to me,” he muttered into his pillow. He was so preoccupied that he did not hear her come into his room: her light touch on his arm startled him and he sat up abruptly.

  “Evan?” said her small, still voice. “Is it that important to you?”

  He waited a moment, afraid she had heard him speak, wondering if he had understood her question. “Is wanting you that important? Is that what you’re asking?”

  She made a little sound and a nod, which he more sensed that saw or heard.

  He took a chance. “Yes. It is.”

  Althoug
h her hand shook and grew cold, she resolutely kept it on his arm. “I don’t know if I can. But I’ll try.”

  “Try?”

  “To do what you want.”

  “I’d like that very much, but I don’t want a sacrifice, Thea,” he said, hating himself for giving her a reason to leave him again. He thought he might still be asleep, and this was his dream. He flexed his toes and felt the sheet move.

  “I’m not trying to sacrifice myself. I just thought that maybe it was right, or it could be right, after all.” She started to draw her hand away, but he caught it in his. Gently, kindly, he touched her arm. “All right. We can try. If you want. It’ll only be okay if you want—”

  “But what do I do?” she whispered.

  “You let me touch you; you let me know when you feel pleasure,” he told her as he untied the belt of the robe she wore. Her body felt stiff as he pulled the robe away, and the urgency that had risen in him calmed, so that his hands were slow and careful. He drew back the covers, moving to give her room. “Come here, Thea. It’s warmer here.”