My god, once again he’d forgotten Inness! He couldn’t seem to manage to hurry, made his way back downstairs, neatening as he went. Jimmy’s letters! On the hearth! Plain sight. He stumbled through the blankets he’d arrayed on the floor, grabbed the letters, ran them upstairs, put them on the high shelf in the closet there in her room for Inness to find or for him to tell her about, just not right this minute.
Inness! He skipped to the mudroom, poor freezing thing. But Inness was fine in his huge clothes, was asleep as in a cocoon, curled tight, strips of duct tape arrayed around her, Rasta cap pulled down over her face. He touched her and she woke instantly, tugged up the hat brim, gave him the patented long look. Which he returned. Eventually, he helped her to her feet, a laborious process, stiff muscles, of course. That had been one brutal hike. They’d been close to death, he suddenly realized. And realized that he was only just realizing it, that he hadn’t known it, that they’d been spared grim knowledge by biology somehow, that they would not have made it to Houk’s Corners, much less home, that they’d been this close. Galvin be praised, and luck, wherever luck came from, and the trunk line, too, and Alison!
Inness teetered, leaned heavily upon him, took a step toward the door, seemed about to fall asleep standing. He lifted her easily, she resisting, it seemed—don’t pick me up—pushing him away but clinging, too, sudden arm flung about his neck. And suddenly again she turned her face to his and kissed his cheek, kissed his throat, bit his chin hard to leave a mark, tugged at his hair and kissed his mouth, not kidding, kissed him, kissed him. He kissed her face where he could, kissed her ear, got an arm all the way round her naked ribcage under his own fleece and pulled her to him hard, a crunch in the cold under the porch light.
He started into the house with her.
“No way,” she said and abruptly let go, half fell out of his arms. She stood unsteadily a moment, then stumbled on her own through the doorway and into the lurid heat and sunlight, their beach.
SARAH A. SLOANE
BILL ROORBACH is the author most recently of the bestselling novel Life Among Giants. Earlier works of fiction include Big Bend, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize and an O. Henry Prize. His nonfiction includes Into Woods and Summers with Juliet. The tenth anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used in writing programs around the world. His work has been published in Harper’s, Orion, the Atlantic, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. He lives in western Maine.
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© 2014 by Bill Roorbach.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-428-0
The Remedy for Love Page 25
