Fire in the Wind

by Alexandra Sellers

  Jake's face was wiped clean of all expression, but behind his tan he was white to the lips. His hands clenched her wrists so tightly she thought her bones would snap. Vanessa opened her eyes wide at him, still distantly amazed at the ease with which the lies came to her, at how deep and powerfully her unleashed anger burned.

  "Larry found out about you and me," she said. "He told me I was a fool, that I couldn't live without him and that I knew it. I did know it, but Larry said he would prove it to me. That night he—" Vanessa's voice deepened as though with pleasure at the memory "—oh, he was wonderful, Jake. He showed me what I'd be giving up if I left him. Afterwards... he said I'd have to marry him immediately or not at all. We were married two weeks later."

  He was like a stone statue, remote and unseeing, a man she could no longer reach. Vanessa felt as though it were all new, the terrible helpless regret of ten years ago, when, after the bright fires of self-sacrifice had burned low, she had seen the ashes she had made of her life.

  She had been too young, at nineteen, to know what she was doing on the day she had given in to the soft pleadings, the gentle tears of Larry's mother. Too young to know that what she had been asked should never have been asked of anyone.

  But when Jace had not answered her letter, she had imagined that the sacrifice and the pain were hers alone. Now she knew better, now she knew what she ought to have known ten years ago, what she would have known if she had had faith in this love. Jace's life, too, had gone up in flames the day she had married Larry, and the heat of those flames had bent his ferocious passion toward revenge, had twisted his enormous capacity for love into this black self-destructive power to hate. And was still at work, destroying her own love for the man who looked into hell when he looked at her.

  Well, it was all too late now. With a floating detachment Vanessa watched Jake get up off the bed and bend to pick up his jacket, watched him put it on. He would leave her now, but it hardly mattered: he was already as far away from her as he would ever be.

  When he turned to face her the flesh of his face was drawn tight, the faint fine scar she had seen last night pulling the left side of his face. Vanessa sat up, unconsciously straightening her shoulders, like someone in the presence of a judge.

  "I haven't finished making you pay," Jake said, in a voice so strained it was unrecognisable, and when his eyes met hers they were haunted. "If you thought you had made up for ten years in one night, Vanessa, you were wrong. You owe me, and you're going to pay."

  * * *

  Vanessa stood under the shower till it ran cold, trying to numb her brain, trying to wash away the memory of the past hour.

  But it did not wash away. She scraped her wet hair back into a ponytail and pushed her sore body into her blue jeans and a T-shirt without knowing or caring what she was doing, and slammed out of her apartment.

  "Holy cow, what happened to you? You get locked out in the storm?" Ilona exclaimed when she arrived at Number 24. She had never arrived at work before without makeup, without being smartly put together.

  Funny, thought Vanessa. That's exactly how I feel. As though I've been locked out in the storm.

  "I woke up late," she said briefly, and Ilona glanced at her closed face and held her peace.

  They were hard at work all day. Duplicate models of the entire line had to be made for all the salesmen to use as samples. Although so far Number 24 had only one salesman, Gilles Dufour, they would have to take on at least four more across the country if they were going to be any kind of success. With any luck Robert would hire them during the next month, and by then the samples would be ready to send off to them. All this wasn't what Vanessa was used to, of course, and it was rather fascinating to think that the clothes she had designed and made in Vancouver might be worn by women an entire continent away in St. John's.

  She worked at speed all day, cutting and pinning and marking and giving orders with an almost desperate precision.

  "Death watching you or something?" Ilona asked finally.

  Vanessa jumped. "Say what?"

  "Death. My grandfather says your own death is always watching you, just waiting for the time. Some days he watches a little more closely, so you feel his shadow, and those are the days when you feel driven: you know death is nearby, and you're afraid he might reach out and touch you before you're ready, before you've finished what you have to do. People who are always driven, he says, are people who feel, inside, that death is watching them very closely."

  "Well, he's watching me today," said Vanessa.

  But it wasn't Death. It was Jake. And the shadow he had cast over her would darken all the years of her life.

  * * *

  She was glad the designing part of the job was over for the moment, because the creative spark in her had died. In the days that followed that terrible morning with Jake the pleasure seeped out of her work until finally she moved through her working day like an automaton. She performed mechanically, if expertly. She perfected the sizes and the fit for the production prototypes, putting in tucks and altering the cut till the perfectionist inside her was satisfied.

  "Your cost per item is going to be too high," Robert said one day, showing her the figures. "You're including too much detail work."

  "The detail work is what makes the garment," Vanessa said flatly. "I told you there'd be detail work."

  Robert looked as though he didn't know how to deal with this new cold business-like Vanessa. "Well, there's too much. This isn't New York, Vanessa. Ted can't set up a production line of detail workers; we don't have a large enough run. He tells me all this has got to be done by the ordinary sewers."

  Vanessa rooted through the papers on her desk, absent-mindedly wondering if a design she had rejected for spring could be used in the summer line.

  "Well, let it be done by the ordinary sewers. What's wrong with that?" she said.

  "It costs the bloody earth, that's what's wrong with it!" said Robert. "You're putting yourself into another price bracket, Vanessa, and it won't work."

  Where the devil was that folder of discarded designs? When she thought that soon she would have to start designing the summer line, Vanessa's forehead grew damp. There was nothing flirting in the corner of her mind's eye this time, waiting to be fleshed out, waiting to become.

  She said, "Didn't you tell me we had an extra hundred thousand so I could keep quality up and prices down my first season?"

  "Yes. Or use it for advertising. We agreed to spend it on advertising in the trade journals, Vanessa. It's already earmarked—"

  "Well, let's not. Let's use it on producing a better product." She found her folder of designs and opened it. She had been feeling very creative while she designed these; some of them, with a little adjustment for a lighter fabric, might—

  "Vanessa, we are committed. There's only one way to get this work done and that's to use sub-contractors."

  She looked at him. "Well, fine, Robert, that sounds fine."

  "Vanessa, sub-contractors use home sewers. Are you aware of what that means?"

  It meant slavery, or little better. It meant mothers on social assistance working long hours to eke out the hopelessly insufficient government cheque, or non-English-speaking immigrants being taken advantage of.

  "Oh, well, it's not so bad in Canada, is it?" she said.

  "Vanessa, where the hell do you think you are, the Garden of Eden?" Robert asked with an angry laugh. "Exploitation is exploitation, no matter where it is."

  Funny, she had used the exact same phrase to Tom once, over the very same issue. "Damn it, Vanessa, they don't even speak English!" Tom had exploded, as though that somehow made it all right. Funny how much she was learning about life, having to run things.

  "Robert, nobody has to accept the work," she pointed out in the same voice that a million had used before and a million would use after her. "I'd rather pull the money off the advertising budget, but if you don't want to, what's our alternative?"

  "The alternative is to kill some of t
hat detail work you're insisting on."

  "Robert, this is Number 24's first season. It's important that we don't cut any corners now; we've got to make a splash. I'll have less detail work in the summer line, and even less for next fall. By next Christmas we'll have phased out the home sewers completely, okay?"

  "Okay," said Robert, getting to his feet. He gathered his papers together and left her alone, staring down at her folder designs.

  A drop of water fell onto the sketch of a yellow pencil skirt with a pretty fan of pleats over the knee, and Vanessa watched the yellow ink blotch and run onto the white background. The pipes are leaking, she thought stupidly, looking up, but there were no pipes overhead, and no condensation that she could see on the ceiling. As she looked down again, another drop landed, and then she understood. With a laugh that shook and turned into a sob she wiped her cheeks, and then, abruptly, she was face-down on her desk, head in her arms, sobbing. Her whole body trembled with the force of her weeping. The sounds must have been audible in the other offices, but no one came to investigate. She was alone.

  * * *

  September thirteenth was declared Terry Fox Day in Canada, and his Marathon of Hope was to be commemorated by small marathons in cities and towns across the nation. It seemed that everyone she talked to either planned to "run for Terry" or had pledged money to someone who did.

  She felt a deep connection with the young man who had died before she had even come to hear of him; and now, in moments of a despair so dark she sometimes thought she could not survive, sometimes she remembered that gentle, open, ordinary face and wondered what depths of darkness he had run through to reach the light.

  "I'm running in the Marathon of Hope," she said suddenly to Ilona one afternoon, surprising herself. "Will you give me a pledge?"

  "I'll pledge you if you'll pledge me," Ilona said. "I'm running, too." They both laughed, caught up in the secret shared by an entire nation, and offered each other ten dollars a kilometre over the ten-kilometre run. By the time Terry Fox Day arrived, Vanessa was running for twenty-three dollars a kilometre, and Ilona for forty. They ran the course together, smiling at the dozens of other joggers wearing Terry Fox t-shirts and at the people waving as they went by, and feeling very strongly their kinship with the family of man.

  A few days later Vanessa collected cheques for the fund totalling two hundred and thirty dollars and listened with a bubble of pride when she heard that the fund had gone over the twenty-seven-million-dollar mark.

  "Terry suggested a dollar for every man, woman and child in Canada," Celeste Boyd said as she smilingly passed over her check, "and he has certainly made it."

  Jake's secretary had pledged ten dollars, which gave Vanessa an excuse to go to his office. "Is Jake in?" she asked casually as the check was being written.

  "No, he isn't. Why, did he pledge, too?" asked Jean with a flicker of hastily smothered surprise, and Vanessa knew with a sickening wrench that Jean had been instructed to keep Vanessa away from this office.

  "Not me," she said gaily. "But he must have pledged someone, don't you think?" A number of Concorp employees had run in the Marathon of Hope and Jake certainly could have pledged them all without feeling the pinch.

  "I don't know," said Jean. "I don't think anyone asked him."

  "Nobody asked Jake Conrad?" Vanessa demanded unbelievingly. "If I'd known that I'd have asked him for a hundred dollars a kilometre!" If she could have got near him, she amended mentally. And if she could have got a word out in his presence without begging for something very different from a donation....

  "Good afternoon, Mr. Conrad," Jean chirruped in a panicky voice, and Vanessa whipped around and her eyes locked with the cold angry gaze of Jake Conrad.

  "Good afternoon, Jean. Good afternoon... Vanessa," he said, and she knew he had almost said, "Mrs. Standish."

  Vanessa had an insane desire to run, but she managed to stand her ground. In a bright brittle voice that fooled no one, she said, "Jean says she doesn't think you pledged anyone in the Terry Fox run, Jake! Did you?"

  "I pledged Marigold," he said, his eyes steady. He had a briefcase in his hand; he looked as though he would open it and start to work the instant he got behind his desk. He looked busy and important.

  "And how much did that cost you?" Vanessa demanded.

  "Marigold didn't run."

  Jean tittered and choked herself off, and there was a short silence.

  "Well, I ran," offered Vanessa. "I'm just collecting my pledge from Jean." That let Jean off the hook for allowing Vanessa in the vicinity, she hoped. "How would you like to make a retroactive pledge?"

  "For how much?" he said, as though it would be too much trouble to argue with her.

  "A hundred dollars a kilometre?" Vanessa hazarded, her eyes wide as she gazed into his.

  "How far did you run?"

  "Ten kilometres."

  "Fine." He looked over her shoulder. "Jean, would you make out a cheque to the cancer society for Mrs. Standish for one thousand dollars?" He moved toward his office door.

  "Not a company pledge!" Vanessa said. "The company should pledge much more than that! That's your personal pledge! You should give me the cheque from your personal account."

  He held her gaze for a long moment, his hand on the doorknob. Abruptly he opened the door and held it for her. "Come in," he said.

  Her heart in her mouth, Vanessa crossed the threshold and felt him follow her in and close the door.

  As she hesitated, he strode across to his desk and, laying his briefcase on it, flicked the snaps open.

  "What do you want, Vanessa?" he asked.

  "A thousand dollars for the Terry Fox fund."

  He sank down in his stuffed black leather chair, tossed some files out of his case onto the desk, snapped the case closed and set it on the floor. He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a flat maroon chequebook, dropped it with a little slap on the desk top. Without taking his eyes from her, he pulled a pen out of his inner breast pocket and unscrewed the lid.

  He wrote the details on the cheque smoothly, without pausing, signing his name the same way he wrote the rest, without a flourish. Vanessa had sat down in the chair in front of his desk, and he ripped the paper from the book and flicked it casually across the desk. Then he sat looking at her.

  Vanessa picked up the cheque with a hand that nearly trembled. "Thank you," she said, staring unseeingly down at it. His silence terrified her; at any moment he might break it to tell her to go.

  "Jake, how do you want me to pay?" she blurted in a sudden rush of courage.

  He knew what she meant; his hand was in her line of vision and she saw it tense on the pen he was holding. Her ring was gone, a white mark against his tan showing where it had been.

  "Why, are you going to offer some sort of voluntary payment?" he asked dryly.

  "Could I?" she asked, her head still bent.

  "What, for example? Crawling to Calgary in sackcloth and ashes?" The sarcasm in his voice drummed against the top of her head. "Or were you thinking of something a little more personal, like becoming my mistress till I tired of you?"

  Her head snapped up. "Is that what you want?" she began. Is that what he had meant—that he would destroy her emotionally the way she had destroyed him emotionally?

  "No, that's not what I had in mind," he interrupted roughly. "For one thing, I am already tired of you. And for another, a voluntary payment won't be nearly so satisfying as one extracted under protest."

  She shivered at the coldness in his voice. "Oh God, Jake," she protested. "You don't want to rape me?"

  His face became a frozen mask of distaste. "My God, women!" he exploded with a mirthless laugh. "No, I do not want to rape you," he said precisely. "For one thing, I don't want you sexually. For another, since I understand these days that rape isn't sexual but political, I would consider the animal bludgeoning of the body and the spirit an extremely unimaginative method of revenge, either against society or against an individual. To say the leas
t of it."

  Vanessa was still shivering. "Who was your mentor, Machiavelli?"

  Jake smiled his crooked smile. "No," he said softly. "You were. And I think I learned my lesson well. Someday I'll ask you whether you think I did."

  "Jake," she begged, "if it's my heartbreak you want, you've already had it. I fell in love with you thinking I had a chance to make you love me, and found out you hated me. Isn't that enough? What else is there?"

  He shook his head. "If I thought you had a heart that was worth it, that might have been enough, Vanessa. But your kind of heart, if it does in fact break, heals too quickly for what I want. When you pay me, it's going to be payment in full. I'm going to break you another way. I'm going to ruin you, Vanessa."

  She gasped. It sounded like a line from a melodrama, except that it was delivered in such a matter-of-fact voice.

  "Ruin me, how?" she demanded with a nervous laugh.

  He looked at her. "Professionally, how else? I am going to let you go on building up Number 24 for as long or as short a time as the mood takes me, and then I am, one way or another—and I have my choice of several—going to bring it crashing down around your ears so loudly you'll never have the courage to start up in business again."

  For one appalling second she was shaken to the roots, then she bit her lip and made an effort at recovery.

  "How are you going to do that?" she demanded. "You're bluffing. You have no control over Number 24."

  Jake raised his eyebrows. "You're more naive than I thought. I can pull the plug on you in that company from so many different directions it would make your head spin."

  "What?" she gasped.

  "Did you really believe that that quarter-million-dollar contract had you safe?" He shook his head and laughed softly but said no more, and Vanessa took courage. He was bluffing, trying to scare her.

  "Of course it does," she said. "Unless you think giving me a quarter of a million dollars is making me pay." His smile was crookedly arrogant, and she snapped, "Then tell me, if you're so sure of yourself!"