by Thomas Perry
He waited for several minutes, until she sat up and looked around again. They were both cold, and she was shivering. He got his backpack, opened it, and wrapped his towel around her shoulders. He said, “Are you feeling well enough to walk yet?”
She nodded. “I’m okay now. Thanks for helping me. But you shouldn’t—”
“Good,” he interrupted. “Come on.” He put on his pack, gripped both her arms firmly, and tugged her to her feet. He kept his tone even and businesslike, trying to hold on to the quickly evaporating authority he had assumed in saving her, the emergency voice. “There’s a set of steps that lead to the road about a half mile this way.”
“I know. That’s the way I came.”
“Is your car up there?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I walked from town.”
He clenched his jaw. He had never before seen any sense in driving somewhere to go for a walk. Now he did, and he could also see that never bringing a telephone with him had been stupid. He didn’t tell her he had no car with him, because he was afraid to upset the fragile hold he still had on her.
He kept walking, moving steadily to get to the stairway. He had a very strong intuition that if he got her off the beach, she would be out of immediate danger and his responsibility would end.
At last they reached the wider stretch of beach, where the cliffs were lower and the steps zigzagged upward to street level. He stood by the first of the wooden railroad ties that had been set into the cliff. Trying to keep his hands from shaking, he took his walking shoes out of his pack, slipped them on, and waited for her to go ahead of him. He knew he had to get her up and away from the ocean, but he also sensed that if he rushed her, she would resist. Finally, she stepped on the first railroad tie, and he quickly moved in behind her. When she stepped to the second, he followed. She climbed slowly, not as though she was physically tired but as though she was reluctant to leave the ocean. She would climb a dozen steps, then turn and look over her shoulder at it with a silent resignation.
When they were at the top, he set off across the grass to the road without hesitating to give her a chance to resist or even think about where he was leading her. They walked silently until they were at the long, curving road that led between two dry hills toward the part of town he wanted to reach.
She said, “You don’t have a car?”
He smiled. “Sure I do. It’s just not where I’d like it to be at the moment. I always walk here.”
“What for?”
“I’m an old guy. I need the exercise.”
“You didn’t have any trouble swimming out there and dragging me out of the ocean,” she said. “You must be okay.”
“You’re not very heavy,” he said, but he allowed himself to feel good about the faint compliment. She was right. He had saved a drowning person’s life. That was not a minor thing. He judged its value by looking at the girl, her small, appealing face wreathed in stringy wet hair, her trim, small body: yes, he noted, even now, in this circumstance, he couldn’t help it. He imagined how he would have felt to see her dead, and made the comparison. No, saving her had not been a negligible accomplishment. If she used her life well, saving her might be the most important thing he had ever done. Certainly this extra chance was the best thing he had ever given anyone.
He had to preserve it by never letting his attention flag, had to be sure that everything he did now was exactly right, because he could feel that it was like a puzzle solved in the dark, with answers that would help her live, and others that would kill her. He knew he needed to keep the means of suicide away from her. He constructed a mental image of the area ahead and designed a course, so they could walk the two miles to town on streets that never came within sight of the ocean. He sensed in himself the human compulsion to say things, but he resisted. There were too many chances to make a mistake, trigger a painful memory, or offend her. He also had an exact destination in mind, and as it drew nearer, he wanted to avoid the charge that he had spoken just to keep her occupied, to hide the most important information from her.
He approached the county hospital with a feigned casualness, feeling grateful that they had built it at the end of a long, curving driveway that made it look small and unthreatening. When she saw that he was turning to go up the driveway, she said, “What are you doing?”
“You almost drowned.” He tried to make his throat relax, so she would not detect his tension. “You need to be checked over.”
“No.” She said it over her shoulder as she walked away. “I’m not going in there.”
He walked quickly to catch up with her. “You’re making a mistake.” He meant that he had no other place in mind. He had to find somebody to share this responsibility with him, some figure of authority who would know how to keep her alive. He had to keep her alive.
She walked more quickly. “Then I’m making a mistake.” She was not going to let him get her in there. Maybe she had been locked up before for trying to kill herself. Maybe she had only heard of it, but she knew.
He said, “If you’d rather go to your own doctor, we can stop at my place and I’ll drive you there. But you really should get an exam.” A desperate hope that he had simply missed an obstacle that was easy to overcome flashed across his consciousness: maybe she couldn’t afford a doctor. “I’ll be happy to pay for it.”
She only moved her head enough to turn a half-lidded eye on him. His own voice had sounded false to him.
He said, “Where would you like to go? Does your family live in town?”
“No. You’re the only one I know here. I drove in this morning.”
“From where?”
“New York.”
“Is there anybody you can call?”
She turned to him with a frown of annoyance. “Of course. Millions of them. I don’t want to call anyone.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help you. What can I do?”
“Nothing.”
“I think you need help.”
“I don’t.”
She walked along for a few paces, and the defiant, angry posture of her body had a kind of liveliness that made him less careful.
“You tried to kill yourself.”
“I did kill myself. You came after me and dragged me back. I don’t have the energy right now to hate you. I think I need to sleep.”
“Right.” He brightened. “Things will look different to you when you wake up.”
“Sure.”
“My house is right up ahead. I’ll get my car and drive you to a good hotel. And don’t worry about the cost. I’ll take care of it.”
“I’ll walk.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of you? No.”
“Of anyone. Are you running from something?”
“I have nothing to run from.” She walked ahead quickly and then across the street. After a few more steps on the sidewalk, she turned to see him behind her.
“I don’t think being alone will make you feel better right now,” he explained. “Want to get something to eat?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you look like a very nice young woman who shouldn’t kill herself. Are you dying of cancer or something—in a lot of pain?”
She shook her head. “Nope. No sickness. I had my reasons for what I did, and it’s nothing you can talk me out of with your kindness and wisdom. Thanks for your concern and everything.”
“Then you’ll get through this. Someday you’ll be really glad you didn’t die. Something wonderful will be happening and you’ll look back and be amazed that you might have died and missed out on it.”
She kept walking. He began to follow as usual, but she stopped. “Don’t. I’m fine now and I’m over it. I don’t want you to be with me. I can make a fuss and make you look like a creep. I don’t want to reward your kindness like that, but I will if you make me. So go.”
He stopped and took a step backward. “If you decide you need help, I live in that house right up there.” He poin
ted. “My name is Robert Mallon.” He saw her look at the house. It was a two-story brick colonial with white shutters and a green, well-tended lawn. He hoped it looked respectable to her, and that the front windows he had enlarged for light made it seem open enough to be safe. “Come inside,” he said. It was irrational, desperate.
“All right.” She followed him up his driveway, while he marveled at the exchange: why he had dared to say it, why she had acquiesced.
He unlocked the door and let her in first. She moved slowly around the living room while he slipped off his backpack and carried it to the laundry room off the kitchen. He knew she was examining his things and drawing conclusions about him. “Would you like tea or coffee or a soft drink, or … whatever?”
“I’d like a glass of water, and then I would like to sleep for an hour.”
He opened the refrigerator and took out one of the cold bottles of water he kept there for his walks. Then he climbed the stairs and showed her to the spare bedroom. “This is it. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bathroom attached, with clean towels and everything, so you can take a hot shower. There’s a robe hanging on a hook behind the door. In the dresser there are T-shirts, sweatshirts, some shorts. None of them will fit you, but you can tighten a belt around the shorts to keep them up until yours dry. Anything else you need, holler.”
She stepped into the room and closed the door. As he reached the stairway, he heard the lock click into place. He didn’t blame her. Who the hell was he, anyway? And he supposed his behavior had struck her as at least mildly peculiar. She could not know why he wasn’t able to give up and leave her alone. She didn’t know that this was not his first try. He had been the last one in the family to talk to Nancy. It had been more than thirty years ago, but today the desperate, panicky feeling of regret that always came when he thought about Nancy had come back, almost as though he were getting a second chance but still didn’t know what to do.
Mallon sat in the living room, waiting. He stared at the empty staircase for minutes at a stretch, listening for the young woman to do something unexpected that he would need to oppose very quickly and flawlessly. When his eyes had stayed there for a very long time without anything happening, he turned and stared out the front window, still listening for sounds from above. He was not sure what he expected to see out there, but he knew what he wished he could see. He longed for the nonexistent, the impossible: an ambulance would pull up that was unmarked, and out would come a municipal team of specially trained psychiatrists—female psychiatrists at that, strong-minded but soft-voiced—who had been dispatched because somebody on the bluff above the beach had seen what had happened and reported it. They would gently bundle the girl in a blanket and rush her off to some discreet, ultramodern clinic for the suicidal. By bedtime there would be so many antidepressants in her bloodstream that she would be incapable of imagining herself dead.
He heard the faint sound of water running in the pipes below the room, then a distant hiss of spray from above. She was in the shower. He glanced at his watch and half-smiled, then realized that the knotted muscles between his shoulders had just relaxed a bit. She had slept for two hours, and now she was in the shower, feeling the hot water pelting her skin, warming her and soothing her. She was recovering.
The thought slowly curdled. He always left supplies in the guest bathroom, still in their packages from the store: soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, combs and hairbrushes, shaving cream, razors. Could she hurt herself with a disposable razor? If she broke off the plastic and sawed away at an artery, she could probably cut her way through. Maybe the hot water was to keep the blood flowing.
He told himself that it was foolish to think of such a thing, and retorted that it was foolish to think of anything else after seeing her try to kill herself. Bright blood could be spurting rhythmically from her neck and washing down his drain right now. How could he leave her alone up there to do it? But he could hardly burst into the shower.
The sound of the water stopped. He took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself while he tried to interpret it. A few minutes went by, but he still had no conclusion. Then the sound of running water began again. It sounded slightly different to him, but he was not sure why, until it occurred to him that this time it was the bath. The sound suddenly grew louder. The door up there must have opened. He revised the impression: it must have been both doors, not just the one to the hallway, but the bathroom door too. He stood and looked in the direction of the stairs.
The girl appeared on the upstairs landing, his bathrobe cinched tightly at the waist and coming to her ankles. She said, “I’m running your bath for you. Come on up.” Then she disappeared into the upstairs hallway.
Mallon hesitated for a moment. Running a bath for him wasn’t a normal thing for a suicidal girl to do, or even a thing that he could have anticipated as possible under the circumstances. But it had the curious effect of imposing normalcy on the proceedings in the house. They had both been in the ocean and walked home in wet clothes. She’d had her chance to wash the sand and salt off, and now in the natural order of events, he could have his turn. He sensed that to reject her restoration of simple civility, to insist on treating her as a mental patient, someone whose acts needed to be scrutinized and mistrusted, would be a bad tactic. As long as she had a desire to behave well, he must let her. As he walked to the staircase, it occurred to him that a strange reversal had taken place. Now he was the one who was behaving irrationally, acting as though nothing had happened.
He climbed the stairs. The door to the guest room was closed. He could tell that the bath he heard running now was the one down the hall, in his master suite. It was a little presumptuous of her to go into rooms he had not invited her to enter, but he chided himself for that thought. Was she supposed to have him use the smaller guest bathroom that he had set aside to be hers? That would have felt even more awkward, because it would imply a kind of forced proximity, even intimacy. He was going to accept her gesture exactly as it had been made. What other sign of sanity could he demand of her, than her acting sane?
He entered his bedroom and stepped through it into his bathroom. The water was high in the oversized bath, and the air jets had been turned on and left bubbling. He tested the temperature of the bath water, turned it off, then closed the bathroom door. He took off his walking shoes and his shorts, pulled the T-shirt off, then stepped into the tiled shower stall. He had decided that the bath would feel better after he washed off the sand and salt, as she had done. He washed his hair, soaped himself and rinsed, then turned the shower off. He opened the glass door, stepped onto the mat, and caught a shape at the edge of his vision. He had not heard the door open, and the impression of an intruder made his muscles stiffen and his chest draw in air in preparation for a struggle. His head whirled to see.
She smiled at him pleasantly and said, “I hope I didn’t startle you. Didn’t the shower feel great?” She ran a hand through her long, wet hair.
Mallon took a step backward to place his body back out of her line of vision in the shower stall. “Yes, it did,” he said calmly.
“You don’t need to hide in there now,” she said. “I already got an eyeful.” She stepped close to the big bathtub, then turned away from him and let the bathrobe fall to the floor. She bent at the hips to place her hand on the rim of the tub to steady herself, then put a foot in the water. His eyes were drawn down her smooth back to her buttocks and the glimpse between her thighs.
She laughed, a sudden giggle, and his eyes shot to the mirrored wall and met hers. She had been watching his reaction. She straightened and slowly turned to face him, stood still for a moment with her arms held out from her sides. “It’s just me.” She sat down, and the water rose nearly to her breasts. “Come on in. I left you plenty of room.”
He stepped onto the shower mat, took a towel from the rack, and wrapped it around his waist. “What are you doing?” he asked disapprovingly.
“Trying to get you into the bathtub with me,” she replied. “
What does it take?”
“You know what I mean,” said Mallon. “Do you think you have to do this out of gratitude, or something?”
She smiled disparagingly and said, “I don’t believe in that. If you were drowning, I think I would have to try to save you. I don’t think I’m obligated to fuck you. It’s just something I feel like doing.”
He said carefully, “You’re very pretty, but—”
“Thank you,” she interjected. Her body gave a slight bow, and the movement dipped her breasts into the water for an instant, then out again.
“But,” he continued, “I’m twice your age.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s always been a great deterrent to men in the past.”
“It has to me.”
“Don’t be a hypocrite. There are female items in one of the master bedroom drawers, and they’re not your size. Women visit you and pretend to forget their underwear so you’ll remember them.”
He bristled. “They’re a lot older than you are, and they know what they’re doing. What were you searching my room for?”
“The condoms. I found them, too. A couple of big boxes, Bobby, and half are missing. All the evidence shows you’re a naughty man, so don’t get all huffy and waste a perfectly good naked woman.” She raised an eyebrow and pointed at the water in front of her belly. “You’ve been down there before. A lot. Haven’t you?”
He caught himself in the beginning of a smile, but smothered it and raised his eyes to stare into hers, willing himself to ignore her nakedness. “Look, I would feel as though I were taking advantage of you. Whether you feel some misguided sense of reciprocity or have a morbid impulse to see what it’s like to sleep with a man who’s way too old for you doesn’t much matter. You’ve just been through a difficult experience, and you’re not thinking clearly right now.”
