It Happened One Night

by Lisa Dale

  “And people say astrophysicists are stuffy,” she said, laughing.

  Warmth and gladness rushed over him. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He saw the moment she relaxed, the subtle loosening of her shoulders, her hand falling from its place over her heart. In the shadows the white of her sundress glowed luminescent against the light from the television. Her hair, shoulder-length and cut bluntly at the bottom, shone platinum like the moon.

  “It’s good to see you too.” She glanced toward the flickering light from her old, boxy television. “I wondered how I could have left the TV on all night. Glad to know I’m not losing my mind.”

  “I fell asleep on the couch. I came to… to give you a present.”

  “What is it?” she whispered, her eyes glittery with delight. She looked like she might hug him. But of course she would not.

  “Hold on.” He went to his bag and rummaged around until he found her gift. It was a small box wrapped in recycled brown paper and tied with a polka-dot shoelace. Simple, earthy, and a little silly. Just like Lana.

  His hand brushed hers as she took the box, a contact so brief and slight it was barely contact at all, but she snatched her arm back as if she’d been burned. He acted like he didn’t notice.

  “Open it,” Eli said.

  She did. The shoelace wound around her index finger as she untied the bow, and the brown paper opened like a fortune cookie. A small purple box was inside, its hinges creaking as she lifted the lid and saw a large pendant hung from a black leather thong. It caught the bluish light of the television and gleamed.

  “Oh, my… Is it…?”

  Eli took out the pendant and laid it on his palm. The gnarly black stone seemed liquid in the shadows, otherworldly and vaguely powerful. “It’s from the Sikhote-Alin’ Mountains. A fall in Russia, 1947. It reminded me of you.”

  “You got this on the trip when you stayed with those old KGB guys?”

  “Yeah. The ones with the pet goat…”

  She snatched the pendant back from him. She hung it around her neck and covered it with her hand. “I love it. It’s perfect. Thank you.”

  For a moment Eli could only look into her eyes, rapt. She was beautiful, any man could see that. But it was more than beauty that held him so tightly he couldn’t look away. It was her. Lana. The sheer rightness of standing here with her after so long. He wanted to draw her to him and hold her. To tell her how glad he was to see her again. How he’d spent the past three days in a kind of giddy haze because he knew he’d be home soon. How he’d realized something that made his heart want to leap and cower at the same time.

  But there was no way to tell her. Not in words.

  He knew he was staring. He saw her face change, tenderness slipping into a quiet disbelief, as if she’d heard what he was thinking and didn’t know what to make of it. They were standing so close that he could smell her floral perfume, and beneath that, the scent of her warm skin. She ran her hands up the sides of her naked arms as if to fight a chill, and the soft brushing sound was amplified to excruciating loudness in his mind.

  “Lana…” Eli could only stare, grappling with the urge to kiss her. He wanted his hands on her face, in her hair. He leaned toward her, a fraction of an inch. If they’d been standing across the room from each other, the exact same gesture would have meant nothing. But this close, where smell and sound were so heightened, his small, almost imperceptible movement caused shock to flash across her face, as if he’d told her he wanted to make love on the floor.

  She laughed a little nervously, stepped back, and frowned.

  “Lana?” A man’s voice cut through the moment, breaking the connection between them, and Lana’s gaze darted down the darkened hallway, panic showing on her face. Quickly, she reached out and flipped on the overhead light, blinding both of them. By the time Lana’s date came into the room, Eli had grabbed his bag and was heading toward the door.

  “What’s going on?” the man said.

  Eli paused, caught. Anger and humiliation gripped his gut.

  Lana cleared her throat. “Ron, this is Eli. Eli, Ron. Eli just stopped by to give me my birthday present.”

  “Right, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ron said, smiling. His white dress shirt hung open like the flaps of a tent, and his hair fell to his shoulders in dusty brown corkscrews. He was tall and thick, and he had a strong nose with a bump at the bridge. On the surface his smile appeared genuine. But Eli could see what Lana could not—the subtle, private menace that passed between men in moments like this, when a beautiful woman stood exactly between them. “You’re the meteor hunter. Crazy hobby you’ve got.”

  “Actually, it’s meteorites. And it’s a job, not a hobby.”

  “But I thought you were a teacher,” Ron said.

  “That too.” Eli adjusted the weight of the bag on his shoulder. “And what do you do?”

  “Mountain biker. Professional.”

  “Ah,” Eli said. “I should probably go.”

  Lana crossed the room to stand before him. Her eyes were clear blue—almost aqua—and he didn’t miss the message within them, meant only for him: I’m sorry.

  He blew her off. The last thing he needed was her pity. From the look on her face, she hadn’t felt that spark, that buzzing of attraction that was more than simple lust. What an idiot he was. “All right. Well, I’m outta here,” he said cheerfully, pulling at the door handle. “You two kids behave yourselves.”

  “Won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” Ron said.

  Eli didn’t smile. Poor guy, he thought to himself. Poor, stupid guy. He gave it two months—three tops—before Lana got bored.

  “Happy birthday, Lana.”

  She glanced down, suddenly shy. Then he closed the door, closed them in and away, and looked up at the stars, which were the same stars they’d always been, the same stars he’d been studying for his entire adult life. Only tonight they seemed much, much farther away.

  Twenty minutes after she’d closed up the Barn for the night, Karin Palson reached her house in the quiet outer suburbs of Burlington. She opened the front door of her split-level and walked up the carpeted stairs to the living room. The small television was dark on its stand and the lampshades were filled with shadows. Apparently her husband was working late at the insurance office again. The plastic shopping bag in her hand, containing just one small book, felt heavy enough to pull her arm from its socket.

  She sat down on the couch, not taking off her denim jacket, not removing her purse from her shoulder, not turning on a light. She dropped the bag beside her. The house was as empty and dark as her heart.

  Karin had never been the type to put any stock in folklore. The idea that her menstrual cycles followed the pattern of the moon was a lovely idea, but as far as she could tell, it was bunk. When a woman from her book club said she’d conceived a son by having her husband wear socks while they did it doggie-style, Karin just laughed. And when Lana proclaimed that the reason Karin couldn’t get pregnant was because she “wanted it too badly,” she thought her sister was well-intentioned, but utterly wrong.

  And yet for all her distrust of old wives’ tales and rumors, she kept listening. She listened to her doctors, other women, books, and the Internet. She was familiar with every technique and method of family planning: the calendar-rhythm method, the standard days method, the sympto-thermal method, the Billings ovulation method. So many methodical methods. Enough to drive a woman insane. She hoped that if she just kept listening, listening hard to everything, not missing a single bit of information, then she would find the answer she was looking for.

  Unfortunately, while she was lying under the furious white lights in the exam room and trying not to shiver, her doctor told her the bad news. She wasn’t necessarily infertile, but she wasn’t necessarily fertile either.

  In other words, he had no idea what was wrong. Technically everything checked out fine. From the way he’d stuttered and frowned, Karin could tell he’d felt pressured to come up with a pin
point diagnosis, a reason for their broken hearts. There was a chance, he’d explained, that Karin and her husband were two perfectly healthy and fertile people, as unique individuals. But together their bodies might not be a compatible match.

  This was the answer Karin had been dreading. Science had put a man on the moon, had developed “food” that had no calories, and had discovered a vaccine for cervical cancer. But in the most primal and important process of human life, they just didn’t know enough to tell her what exactly was wrong or how to fix it.

  So other than God—who was keeping mum on the subject—who could help?

  She took the book out of the shopping bag and held it in two hands. Though she could barely see the cover in the darkness, it had been burned onto her retinas: It showed a woman meditating, surrounded by floating orbs of blue-green light. It was little more than a glorified pamphlet, and in her misery and desperation, she’d read much of it by the light of a streetlamp in the bookstore parking lot. The author believed that if a couple was having trouble conceiving, it was possible to talk to the spirit of an unborn child—to reason with it and coax it into life.

  The book also said that some babies wouldn’t come into a home that wasn’t in harmony. Karin had banged her fist on the dashboard so hard that she’d almost made a dent. Wasn’t her house in harmony? How could she and Gene be more in harmony than they already were? Hadn’t they shown that they were ready?

  Now, sitting alone in the living room with the book, she wished she hadn’t bought it. She and her husband tried hard to be good Christians. They weren’t perfect, but they went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and prayed at night. They’d managed to abstain from sex until two months before their wedding (the priest had chuckled when Karin confessed). And they’d never used condoms or birth control, only fertility awareness, which had been taught to them by a nun who called Gene’s sperm “the swim team.”

  She and Gene both believed that if God wanted them to have a baby, they would have one the natural way. No hormones, no injections, no sperm banks, no surgeries, no adoption agencies. And no talking to spirit babies. She’d probably have to confess that too.

  She heard the front door open. Quickly she bent and slipped both the book and the bag under the cushions of the sofa. At first Gene didn’t see her. But she saw him, silhouetted in the light from the porch as he climbed the short flight of stairs to the living room. Though he was ten years older than her at forty-three, he still had a very strong look about him. She loved his thinning red-blond hair, his big shoulders and hefty build that she’d always believed were vestiges of Highland kings.

  He saw her when he reached the top of the stairs. “The lights were all off. I was worried.”

  “I just got in.”

  He moved toward her through the shadows and sat beside her. He didn’t turn on the light. “How did it go at the doctor’s?”

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “What was the verdict?”

  “It’s a hung jury. We need a retrial.”

  She heard Gene’s sigh, saw his back—normally so straight and strong—slump into the slightest crescent.

  “In some states, infertility is grounds for divorce,” she said.

  “That’s not true. We’ll go to another doctor. Get another opinion.”

  Karin tried to laugh, but it came out closer to a sob. “I’m tired of being poked and prodded and talked about as if my body were somehow different than me.”

  “I know,” Gene said. He reached over to rub her back.

  She leaned against him, put her head on his shoulder. Outside, even under the cover of darkness, the Vermont countryside was glorying in its own fertility: hepatica, bloodroot, trillium, columbine, and dandelions bloomed profusely, the mountains letting loose in emerald, olive, and mint. And here was Karin. Fertile as a lump of coal.

  Still, she couldn’t let this rule their lives. She hugged Gene tight, breathing in the spicy smell of his deodorant. “Let’s go out. Let’s get burgers, go to a movie, and make out in the last row.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. Let’s go on a date. Like two teenagers out on the town.”

  “Do I have to have you home by ten?” he asked.

  “Only if you promise to keep me awake ’til eleven.”

  Gene laughed and helped her to her feet.

  May 10

  The next morning Lana stood in the Wildflower Barn and chatted with Mrs. Montaigne, one of the many regulars who made a point of stopping by during Lana’s shift. The sun slanted hard and bright into the yellow room that had been built to house their shop. Other parts of the Barn were utilitarian and somber, used for storage and mixing seeds. But this room was Lana’s favorite. She’d hung wind chimes and stained glass in the small, high windows to catch the light. Her coffee cup steamed on the counter in the cool air. And though she’d awoken this morning to find her bed empty, she refused to let Ron’s lack of bedside manners ruin an otherwise good day.

  “I just don’t know,” Mrs. Montaigne said, her Quebecois accent peeking through. “I’ve never liked these glaring colors. Orange, red, yellow… Do you have something less bright?”

  “Of course,” Lana said. “Follow me.”

  She led the way to their newest display of seeds and picked up a packet of their cool-tones mix. Mrs. Montaigne took it, her eyes brightening as she showed the packet to her granddaughter. “Oui. This is exactly what we came for. Isn’t it, ma fille?”

  Jackie peered shyly from behind her grandmother’s floral skirt. She rarely talked, but Lana could see that she was always deeply interested, listening, trying to figure things out. Lana had always liked talking to children. Watching them puzzle through everyday life made her see the world a little differently, as if rediscovering it through their eyes. She looked forward to the day she could rediscover it through her own as well.

  Mrs. Montaigne handed the packet to Jackie for a closer look, and Lana couldn’t help but launch into detail about how optimum mixes balanced beauty with durability and diversity. But Karin had cautioned her not to give away too many secrets. They guarded their percentage allocations much like the makers of Pepsi and Coke guarded their recipes.

  “Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me!” Mrs. Montaigne exclaimed, laughing. “To listen to you talk about flowers is like listening to this little one talk about cartoons. There’s just no end!”

  Jackie blushed shyly and Lana thought it would be fun to hear the little girl chatter for a while. But she remained silent as they walked to the counter to check out.

  “I saw your boyfriend last night,” Mrs. Montaigne said, giving a conspiratorial wink.

  “Oh, did you? He took me out for my birthday. Did you know I turned twenty-nine? It was fantastic. Roses, candlelight, and he even sang me a song in the middle of the restaurant. Everyone was looking. It was the funniest thing.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She frowned, lines etched deeply around her mouth. “I saw him in front of the college. He had a suitcase. Like he was coming back from a trip.”

  Lana laughed. “Oh, you mean Eli. He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Well, why ever not?”

  Lana laughed again and couldn’t help but wonder if Mrs. Montaigne had set her up. The question had been posed to her a hundred times—a thousand it seemed. And yet she’d never been able to articulate an answer that could make people understand. “Eli and I are just friends.”

  “But I see you flirting with him all the time.”

  “Laughing with him. I’m laughing. There’s a difference.”

  “But I see the way he looks at you. You cannot tell me that isn’t love.”

  “It is love. It’s platonic love.”

  “If you say so, dear.”

  To change the subject, Lana bent down to talk to Jackie, asking what her doll’s name was and if she wanted to pick a flower to take home. She loved talking to people—about flowers, about the store, about the Burlington area, about whatever was going on i
n her customers’ lives. But Eli was off-limits—a pleasure so private she didn’t like to share.

  “Say good-bye to Miss Lana, Jackie,” Mrs. Montaigne said, after she’d paid for her purchase.

  Jackie took her fist out of her mouth and gave Lana a limp-fingered wave. Lana bent down to her level and smiled. “You know what I think? I think you’ve got a hug for me today, don’t you, sweetheart?”

  The girl grinned, instantly delighted—as if she’d been waiting for permission to throw her arms around Lana’s neck. Then Lana straightened her knees, said good-bye to Mrs. Montaigne, and leaned on the counter, hard. She glanced at the clock, wondering what she and Eli would do tonight—if they would eat dinner at their favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, if they would walk out by the lake.

  At one point after he’d left last night, the meteorite necklace had become the only thing she was wearing on her body. Ron had gripped it in tight fingers and pulled just enough to make her worry it would snap.

  “Is he a lover?” he’d demanded. “Was he ever?”

  Lana had told the truth. Then she took the necklace off and tried to put her best friend out of her mind. Unfortunately, knowing that Eli was nearby but not being able to see him had made her distracted and anxious at entirely the wrong time. He was on her mind a lot these days, so much it was almost bothersome. The solution was simple: She just needed to see him. That was all.

  She counted down the hours until her shift’s end, floating moment to moment. And the second the store was closed, she dialed Eli’s cell phone, eager to hear his voice. She worried her new necklace between two fingers until he finally picked up.

  “What are you doing right now?” she asked. He was unusually quiet.

  “Why?”

  Why? Eli didn’t ask why. A pang of worry made her grip the phone hard. “I just wanted to know if you felt like doing something with me.”

  “Oh.” Again, another long, terrible pause. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “No?”

  “I have plans.”

  She answered as quickly as she could, desperate to hide her disappointment. “Okay. No big deal. I’ll catch up with you some other time.”